I'd like to point everyone to extremely important resources as we move into this new year: the green folder, the teal folder, and the orange folder. These are meant to provide you with some resources when dealing with mental health and sexual violence situations that may arise in your classes or at work.
A key to having people come forward with meantal health or sexual violoence issues is tranparency in our own workplace, research group, and classroom. I encourage you to talk to your students and colleagues about these resouces. Here is language I use on my Canvas Page. As always, you should feel free to adjust these messages to fit your own personal voice such that they read as more earnest and genuine.
If you notice serious changes in your mood or motivation, if you are worried about your physical and mental health and well-being, or if you have been the victim of sexual violence, please reach out and contact me at james@phas.ubc.ca. I am very willing to talk about issues and provide guidance when I can. For full transparency, the resources that I use to assist students, staff, and faculty are posted below.
This folder provides resources for helping students in distress. Pages 4 and 5 are particularly useful as they provide a triage scale for you to use to assess student well-being.
After talking to the student, you should always consider filing an Early Alert (https://facultystaff.students.ubc.ca/systems-tools/early-alert). This creates a centralized case file for students that connects a number of resources and hospitals. Often small hints from multiple sources can illuminate a larger issue with a student. This case file also helps students get counseling faster.
Early Alert Online Training (20 minutes) Talking About Early Alert in Your Class and Syllabus
This folder provides resources for helping students who disclose acts of sexual violence (including things like harassment and exposure) to you.
Do not file an Early Alert for these students. Work to encourage them to seek the help they want. Instead, ask if you can refer them to the Sexual Violent Prevention and Response Office.
This insert sometimes comes with the physical Green Folder and doesn't get talked about much. It contains resources for helping faculty and staff who you see might be struggling.
Course Syllabi: The elements that are strictly required for your course syllabus are described in the calendar under item 7: https://www.calendar.ubc.ca/vancouver/index.cfm?tree=3,328,0,0. The following resource was developed by CTLT to give suggestions for what instructors could do to improve their syllabus beyond the bare minimum.
CTLT_Syllabus toolkit draft v1.1.docx https://senate.ubc.ca/ubc-course-syllabus-template-august-2019/Faculty Primer: In this document you will find a list of curated resources, workshops, and people that can help with your teaching responsibilities
FacultyPrimer_20220622_RevA.pdfPhysical and Mental Health and the Classroom: Students are still expected to do a self-assessment each day and stay home if they are sick. The student code of conduct says that students should not endanger the health or safety of other students https://students.ubc.ca/campus-life/student-code-conduct. A student who is clearly sick could be asked to leave in accordance with this, though facilitating that conversatioon could be difficult. It would be best to set the expectation early. Instructors are encouraged to be compasionate with concession policies and provide support (notes, slides, etc.) so students who are sick can keep up with the material.
There are also time when a student might approach an instructor in class with a mental health issue. Instructors are encouraged to follow the steps in the Green Folder. Currently, if a student is experiencing a severe issue, like suicidal ideation, the student should be escorted to Urgent Care at the UBC Hospital. Counselling Services no longer takes these students. If a student is in urgent mental health distress and is disrupting the class, then phoning 911 is the correct course of action.
Advice on Handling Classroom Distruptions (pdf): This guide, co-developed with the Provost's Office and the VP Students, is intended to give instructors some tools to handle disruptions in the classroom, including when an external group comes into the classroom or when a student distrupts the classroom.
Guide for Handling Repeated Concession Requests from Students (link to google doc): Intructors in Science have the latitude to determine which in-term concession to provide for a student. The UBC Concession policy states that most first-time concessions do not require documentataion and instructors know their class the best, so they are in the best position to determine whether a deadline should be moved, an assignment can be waived, if the weight of an assignment or midterm can be shifted to other assignments, etc. Instructors who feel comfortable with handling subsequent concession requests are free to continue to give concessions to students.
However, instrcutors who feel uncomfortable handling repeated concessions should contact Science Advising advising@science.ubc.ca with a summary of the situation and steps they are planning to take, and any questions or concerns that they have.
Regardless of an instructor's comfort with handling concession requests, if an instructor is worried about a student's wellbeing they should file an Early Alert. If an instructor is worried about a student's ability to complete the course due to a pattern, they should describe the situation to Science Advising such that forther concessions like a withdrawal might be considered.
Standing Deferral (SD) Guide for Instructors (pdf): This guide is intended to help instructors navigate the SD policy at UBC and in Science. We consulted with relevant collaborating units on campus to pull together a guide that we intend to be helpful in at least two ways: for providing a broad overview to support new Science instructors who aren’t familiar with academic concessions and specifically deferred standing; for providing some insight into the bigger process, as well as tools and templates for colleagues who teach science courses (and may have lots of experience with deferred standing).
Academic Misconduct: The Academic Integrity Hub has some great resources for everyone involved in miscondcut. The following handout provides the Faculty of Science procedure for instructors and departments who encounter misconduct.
Academic Misconduct Handout 10Dec2020.pdfWe will be updating this handout to include information about the new Diversionary Process. The best source of information on the diversioary process for faculty, staff, and students is the Academic Integrity Hub Website. An important thing to know is that the procedure only changes things in the Dean's office, and does not affect how departments or instructors handle cases. It is also not a process where outcomes will be less severe than if a student went through PACSD, it is simply a more educative process for certain type of cases.
You are under no obligation to record or stream your in-person lectures. However, some of you might wish to. Please look over the following documents before deciding whether or not to record your class. The first is more rooted in policy, the second rooted in philosophy.
Principles for recording of live classroom activities (PDF) Class Recordings Discussion Paper LTAG July 2022 (PDF)Here are some recording options available to you through UBC.
In the "How do I use Zoom" section of this page there are instructions on "Record an in-person lecture with Zoom". Zoom is a lightweight and easy way to record your lessons that you have control over. This happens in real time so student can participate online if that is somthing you are interested in doing.
UBC Audio/Visual has equipped about 160 classrooms across Campus with recording devices. The page above has instructions on how to do this. Tracy Kion from Microbiology and Immunology has put together a document going through the steps required to set up recording. She's also allowed us to share a video recording of a help session with the AV folks. AV Help Session Video Passcode: c.!vG79N https://ubc.zoom.us/rec/play/4I54otN6RHTfZmWC6WgYBLI34bJzRJI6gi0kvs45sjeajfeojv2QkTDI-0b6uT0v3BuFpF-boViV-1gH.Pn8Hiw6X8OIVXbcQ?continueMode=true. Google Doc of Instructions https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rQ38cYnAX6seEC1Kk4_YRQsaaW3skyW6okP0F1BvTu0/edit This option does not allow for student interaction. The streaming is delayed by 30 seconds to a couple minutes.