5. Ethical Challenges of Digital Technology and the Utah Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints | Troubles Online | AU Press—Digital Publications
5 Ethical Challenges of Digital Technology and the Utah Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
Elena G. Garcia and Erika Johnson
The modern smartphone provides access to incredibly important and uplifting information, including family history and the holy scriptures. On the other hand, it contains foolishness, immorality, and evil not readily available in the past.
—Quentin L. Cook (2019)
“Digital native” is both myth and reality (Selwyn, 2009). Essentially, descriptions of digital technology acumen vary because there are far too many wide-ranging factors that dictate digital technology knowledge and use. Higher education students are often assumed to be digital natives. Applications are online, federal student aid forms are online, an increasing number of courses can be taken online, and entire degrees can be earned online. Naturally, access to digital technology is assumed and, to a degree, expected. However, long-gestating socio-economic barriers, inclusive of race and gender, affect such access; although in this chapter we do not seek to delve into those well-documented impediments to access, we do seek to unpack one of the under-discussed facets of access to digital technology: religion.
We explore a series of conflicts related to digital technology that we witness regularly in our pre-core writing class at Utah Valley University (UVU), a regional, open-enrolment institution in Utah. The first conflict stems from the cultural environment in Utah, one of religious conservatism, with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) influencing culture, behaviour, social structure, and even laws. As is likely the case with many religions, there is a tenuous relationship with the internet. High-ranking individuals in the LDS Church demonstrate the cultural conflict with technology: digital devices and the internet are tools that they can use to expand the missionary work of the church; however, according to the church website , “caution must be exercised in order to protect families and individuals from the potential dangers that are present online” (LDS Family Services, n.d.). Although internet use increased during COVID-19 (which we describe toward the end of this chapter), it does not seem to have changed the cultural conflict.
The second conflict arises because of the nature of the university: we are growing much faster than our space really allows, so it is one reason that there has been a push toward offering more hybrid and online classes, though convenience for students is as equal a priority for providing them. The COVID-19 pandemic sped up this existing push for “flexible” course delivery options. These courses require students to do all of their work with the technologies and online spaces that have the potential dangers discussed by the church, specifically mentioned in a variety of its communicative platforms (which we discuss in the later sections of this chapter).
The third conflict arises because many of our students are working adults with children. They end up taking online and hybrid classes because of their schedules, or they take online and hybrid courses in order to make long commutes less often. Therefore, many students take online and hybrid classes not because they are comfortable with the technologies but because they are the only classes that work in their lives, as revealed by Felicita Arzu-Carmichael in Chapter 2 of this volume. Thus, we would be remiss in our duties as educators and in our responsibilities in higher education if we did not at least have conversations about digital technology platforms that students might one day use in their academic, personal, and professional lives.
We explore this three-pronged conflict alongside survey data from students that provide their perspectives on these issues. As outsiders to Utah and the LDS religion and culture, we were rather unprepared for these potential barriers. Ultimately, in this chapter, we address how conservative, religious culture must be considered in conversations of access and technology. We pay particular attention to the use of social media, YouTube, and other such platforms as components of course work because they are the spaces of most concern for students. Their use is often advocated as a way to engage students in course work, but this can force them into a difficult situation that leads to the opposite results.
What We Have Experienced (Our Narratives)
We are outsiders. We are women of colour. Neither of us is of the dominant LDS religion. We find this information important to state because our outsider status can compound or exacerbate existing conflicts gleaned from both our anecdotal experiences and survey responses. Our status is amplified not only by our religious and visual differences but also by our educational experiences at institutions wholly diverse from where we currently teach.
Garcia: Before I began working at UVU in 2013, I did my graduate work and teaching assistantships at large, research-intensive universities where the students I taught brought their digital technologies to class each day and were familiar with the programs necessary for a writing class. Nearly all of my students also lived in dorms that had computer labs for those who did not already own the tech that they needed. Suffice it to say that I was taken aback or shocked—or just plain confused—the first time that I heard a UVU student say, “I couldn’t finish my homework last night because my parents wouldn’t let me use the computer.” Other students have said that their parents put time limits on their computer use, often being just an hour or two a day. Still other students have said that they have to share the family computer with their siblings, so their time on it was limited.
There are a few specific issues here: students are living at home, sometimes far from the campus; their families do not know, understand, or care that most academic work is done online; and some students do not know about or will not go to libraries or other areas that provide computers on which they could work. Typically, they are younger students coming from high school, where most likely they did their online/computer work at school and their paper-based work at home. I have seen this situation create conflicts in students between what their parents require and what I require.
Johnson: None of the institutions that I have taught at or attended are research intensive institutions, including UVU. However, I taught in “smart” classrooms (those equipped with desktops for students’ use and a “master” computer for instructors’ use), or students brought their digital technologies to class each day. No matter the institution, many assignments were multi-modal, and all assignments were submitted digitally. Although most, if not all, students were knowledgeable and often made use of various word-processing platforms, there were rare instances of unfamiliarity with such platforms. Furthermore, when faculty encountered instances when digital technology platforms were unfamiliar, graduate teaching assistants conducted workshops specifically on those unfamiliar platforms. Any conflict about access that arose was largely the result of socio-economic status, not religious or parental control.
Description of Utah and Our Students
Utah is Mormon majority, white, and not a wealthy state. Although data sources differ in the exact percentage of the population who are LDS, it ranges from about one-third to one-half of adults (Canham, 2012; Pew Research Center, 2015). According to an article in the Salt Lake City Tribune in 2017, in Utah County, where UVU is located, 84.7% of the population are LDS (Canham, 2017). This is significant because, according to UVU’s Institutional Research (2020), 59.4% of the student population are from Utah County. Additionally, again according to UVU’s own research, 72% of students are LDS. We are considering the community’s culture because it affects the university. Married or partnered students make up 39% of the student body, and 17% of those students have children. Such information is meaningful and reflects what we hear from the students who end up registering for online sections of required courses. Furthermore, over 50% of the student population work 21 or more hours a week, and over 25% work 31 or more hours a week, yet another reason perhaps that students take online sections since there is little time during the day or evening to be in classrooms. Arzu-Carmichael thoroughly explains in Chapter 2 the ways that “online education is often understood as education for mostly non-traditional students” perceived to live complicated lives. Although many of our online students could be described in such ways, like Arzu-Carmichael, we recognize that many of them lack the institutional support that they need.
Of additional importance is that three-quarters of UVU students make less than $20,000 a year, and one in three comes from a household that makes less than $20,000. Although income might not directly affect taking online courses, it likely does affect access to digital technology. It is common knowledge that income disparity affects access to digital technology. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “The Digital Divide” or “Digital Difference” is a summation of the difference in internet use based on family income. For a family whose income is $30,000 a year or lower, 24% of teens (the study focused on teens, but since many of our students still live at home, the data is relevant) said “the lack of dependable computer or internet connection often or sometimes prohibited them from finishing their homework,” but for families whose income is $75,000 or more, only 9% reported trouble finishing online homework (Schaeffer, 2021). Taking into account the student demographics of UVU—with more than half of the student population making less than $30,000 a year—internet use among our students is indeed a major concern.
Conflicts
The conflicts regarding digital technologies have three main players, with a variety of interconnected perspectives: the LDS Church, Utah Valley University (faculty, staff, administration) and the students attending UVU. We have created the image above as a representation of the ways each of these three players influence each other.
Figure 2. The relationships between the LDS Church, students, and Utah Valley University.
Students and the Church
The LDS Church and the internet have a complicated relationship. The church has a main website, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (churchofjesuschrist.org), and several social media sites. On the website, within the “Official Social Media Accounts for Church Leaders and Groups” page, the church notes that, “as members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, we have been given the mandate to share God’s light and truth with those around us. Social Media platforms give us a unique opportunity to flood the earth with positive thoughts, imagery, and messages” (Church of Jesus Christ, 2024, July 30). Obviously, there is no denying the ubiquity of social media. In addition, all of the social media pages contain the same information as the main website, maintaining a strong and consistent message.
Something to highlight on the website’s “Scriptures and Study” page is the church’s General Conference, a worldwide gathering of church members. These gatherings essentially provide more firm guidance on how to be an LDS member. Such information is then reiterated on websites and social media platforms. Here we focus on the General Conference of 2019 because of its emphasis on internet use. The speech entitled “Be Faithful, not Faithless” (Owen, 2019) began with an anecdote about distractions facilitated by the internet. The speech focused on church support for gaining “spiritual nourishment” by being faithful. The speech did not linger on the internet—it was a way into the larger concept of being Mormon—but it did open with the dangers of the internet. Peter M. Johnson (2019), in “Power to Overcome the Adversary,” reiterated the concept of distraction with specific attention to the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook and even virtual reality games. But, similar to the other messages, there was a “warning”: “These technological advances are amazing, but if we are not careful, they can distract us from fulfilling our divine potential” (Johnson, 2019). Now, to be clear, the three speeches mentioned (the two here and the speech by Cook quoted at the beginning of this chapter) were among 35 speeches for the October 2019 General Conference, so we cannot and do not argue that there was a concerted effort to exhort turning away from the internet; however, none of the messages were without a caveat about internet use.
Even before the General Conference in October 2019, pages of the church’s magazines, and Ensign (2020), were littered with information on “Positive Uses for the Internet,” “Tips for Internet Safety,” and “Fighting Internet Filth.” Regardless of the overall content, the underlying messages in these speeches and articles is that, though the internet can be spiritually dangerous, it is also for reaffirming faith as long as messages are filtered through the church.
The church makes use of the internet as a means to educate and “recruit,” and, though our institution uses the internet for similar or even the same purposes, students are in a precarious position. We ask and even require them to make use of sites not filtered through the church. Canvas, UVU’s learning management system (LMS), has some hurdles for students who are not savvy in digital technology, but as the university LMS it is an educational necessity. Although we could rely on Canvas as the lone mode of digital technology for all students in our courses, we would be remiss in our duties as teachers, specifically literacy teachers, in not incorporating additional digital technology platforms in our classrooms. For example, the name of our department is Literacies and Composition, and we include digital literacies as part of our instructional focus. In addition to requiring students to use Google Drive components to compose and share assignments, we ask them to use YouTube, and some faculty incorporate social media platforms to discuss the audience as part of our focus on rhetoric. Our incorporation of YouTube is pedagogical, so we initiate the facilitation of students’ ability to conduct a Stuart Selber humanistic critique of digital literacy, a blending of functional, critical, and rhetorical concerns toward a more well-rounded comprehension, critique, and use of digital technologies.
To ascertain how our students use and feel about digital technology, including the internet and social media, we obtained Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval to distribute a survey in the spring and summer of 2019. Our findings both shore up and at times contradict our presumptions of students’ digital technology use and knowledge. Our survey contained 12 questions. All questions were open ended. The survey was disseminated via a link to Qualtrics to 90 students within the first two weeks of each semester. The questions ranged from which digital technology platforms students used or had knowledge of before taking any courses with UVU to their comfort in using digital technology platforms. Numerous social media platforms—including YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook—were specifically mentioned more than once, and terms and phrases such as “inappropriate,” “toxic place,” “inappropriate platforms because it’s not right,” “too political,” and “too much drama” were all stated as reasons in response to the question “Are there any digital technologies or platforms you actively avoid using and why?” Unsurprisingly, these responses echo descriptions of social media from the LDS Church.
It is also not surprising that students mention YouTube. We find YouTube essential in the facilitation of our courses as visual aids for instruction on the audience or in providing essential foundational work on comprehending rhetorical appeals. In such endeavours, we do understand that the algorithm presents certain obstacles to our efforts to provide necessary instruction while not infringing the dominant religion of our student population. For example, in facilitating comprehension of definitions of rhetorical appeal using YouTube, we came across various Latter-Day Saints influencers who promote Mormonism, but in the same searches we came upon ex-Mormon channels that also directed us to several influencers questioning Mormonism and ex-Mormon websites outside YouTube.
Numerous websites created by and content driven by former Mormons exist to extol the problematic nature of Mormonism. For example, Mormon Stories is a site that still reinforces Mormonism, but it appears to focus on more liberal or progressive Mormons; interestingly, it still provides a pathway toward becoming ex-Mormon. The prolific podcast The How-To Heretic addresses being ex-Mormon or living a post-Mormon life, such as keeping Mormon friends or being ostracized, dealing with Mormon family members, et cetera. We also found r/exmormon, “The Best Exmormon Forum on the Internet!” on Reddit. The site is “a forum for ex-mormons and others who have been affected by Mormonism to share news, commentary, and comedy about the Mormon church.” The site appears to be a place both to make fun of Mormonism and to learn how to be ex-Mormon. Some of the information even condemns religion in general. Much of the information comes out of or is directed to Utah, and the content seems to express some people’s deep feelings of anger at being lied to or used during their time with the LDS Church.
These sites are not all of the sites that we found while using YouTube to provide more support in explaining rhetorical concepts. We surmise that these sites are considered “inappropriate” or “toxic” platforms that some of our students actively avoid. Furthermore, these sites are the most immediate, the most content specific, and the most active in online communities of individuals “questioning” their belonging to the church.
We understand that we have choices. We can surely choose not to incorporate YouTube or any social media platform into our courses. As a matter of fact, some of our colleagues have chosen just that: they have made a point of purposefully avoiding social media in their courses. In the summer of 2020, the university began requiring instructors to take workshops on the increased utilization of Canvas to deliver course instruction fully because of the COVID-19 pandemic. During that workshop, more than a handful of instructors in various disciplines specifically stated that they avoided incorporating social media into their courses. They cited many of the same reasons that our survey students cited. This is not surprising since our faculty demographics are very similar to our students. But a recent Money article states that “social media manager is one of the most highly sought positions out there” (Rainbow, 2020) and makes a clear case for the need of higher education to at least pay attention to social media as an integral part of digital technologies. Although we are not necessarily advocating an increased use of social media, we do acknowledge that such platforms have a place and that there is space for their use in our courses.
Students and the University
Over the past several years, our institution has been working to understand the decision-making practices of students for courses, schedules, and preferred modes of delivery. A university-wide committee—Re-Envisioning the Undergraduate Experience—conducted surveys, focus groups, and interviews with students in an attempt to discern the primary problems that the committee could address. The data gathered revealed that course scheduling is the primary factor in choosing a class, particularly with general education courses. Rather than choosing classes that they might enjoy most, students chose classes that worked best for their schedules. Therefore, the institution has been working to revise its approach to scheduling courses. Part of this work has focused on ensuring that students have courses available when they need them and that courses are scheduled at times with the most demand for them, work being done by the University and College Flexible Learning Councils. In addition, the institution intends to make schedules more convenient for working students and students with families. UVU, then, seems to be trying to address the many issues of access described in other chapters in this collection (notably Chapters 2, 3, and 10).
Another component driving our institution’s scheduling revisions is space, or more accurately a lack thereof, not necessarily a student success motivation. Our institution is constantly growing, and we cannot pay for or build quickly enough to meet the demands for space that come with face-to-face classes. Therefore, departments are being encouraged to offer more of their courses in hybrid or online modes of delivery. Although this push started several years ago, it was not until our new president arrived that it became a mandate. Here is an interesting example. A few years ago our then senior vice president of academic affairs sent messages during the finals week of each semester demanding that faculty be with their students at their assigned finals time, even if students would not be taking a final exam then. In our department, we do not hold final exams and instead create finals completed over time and submitted online; there was absolutely no need to meet at a specific final exam location and time. Now, just a few years later, our new provost has sent similar messages just before finals week indicating that, if we are not holding a final exam, then we do not need to meet with our students in a classroom. Although we would like to say that this change was inspired by pedagogy only, we cannot; it is because of space. Our institution simply does not have enough classrooms available for every class to meet in person that week.
Prior to COVID-19, our institution did not offer enough online courses or meet the demand for them from students. Nor did it offer enough online courses in the view of our new president, recently a Microsoft executive. She was shocked at the lack (in her eyes) of technology use at our university. She and the Provost’s Office of Academic Affairs started pushing programs to offer fully online degrees rather than just a smattering of online courses (UVU, n.d., 2020).
The president’s push for greater use of digital technologies affects more than online course offerings. She and others interested in a more “green” campus encourage that all documents used for meetings and most documents used for classes be posted online rather than printed. One of her major initiatives was to create Digital Transformation, “the process of applying technology to fundamentally change how organizations operate and provide value to those served” (UVU, 2020). Our department has taken up this push toward greater use of digital technologies not only in our course practices (many of our faculty do not use any printed documents in their classes) but also in two of our core competencies to emphasize over the next five years: Composing for Digital Contexts and Information Literacy and Technology. As a department, we are trying to keep up with the demands from the institution and the local employers that hire many of our university’s graduates as well as trying to adjust our approaches in anticipation of rather than in response to institutional expectations. Therefore, our students, to achieve academic and professional success, have to function within that context.
Our concern, and part of the exigency of our research on the conflicts surrounding online and digital technologies, are that we cannot assume that our students will be familiar and comfortable with the kinds of digital technologies that we are using, even if they are using their own digital technologies (smartphones) regularly. We are asking them to do different tasks and use different software and even different mechanical skills than those with which they might be familiar. The institution, in its call for an expansion of hybrid and online courses, does not appear (to us) to be paying enough attention to the kinds of inequities in and opportunities for co-creation described by other authors in this volume. We both have had students who struggle to turn on a lab computer or do not know how to use a keyboard or cannot quite figure out Canvas. But how do we help students through the digital struggles that they might be experiencing when the course is online? How do we help them with their problems within a medium that itself is the cause of their problems?
Online teaching and increased technology use in classes that might meet in part or in whole in person often bring expectations of using a multitude of online materials. However, when students carefully avoid falling into internet rabbit holes for fear of coming across an inappropriate and/or unwanted site, some of the affordances offered by the internet are nullified. This is part of our conundrum in how to mitigate an unexpected constraint of incorporating internet use in our courses. Thus, unintentionally, we exacerbate an already tenuous relationship that our students have with digital technologies that can affect how they perceive us, as their instructors, the courses that we teach, and even the university.
Impact of COVID-19
Some of the issues described above became even more visible during the COVID-19 pandemic, not a surprise given some of the problems with teaching online explained well by Jesse Stommel and Sean Michael Morris in Chapter 3 of this volume. Interestingly, new conflicts arose surrounding the use of digital technologies and online courses. We describe some of our observations below.
The LDS Church and COVID-19
The LDS Church was rather cautious in dealing with COVID-19 (Walch, 2020). Nearly all face-to-face services were cancelled or paused (LDS 365, 2020; Rowan, 2020; Walch, 2020), and international missionaries were reassigned to their home countries (Newsroom, 2020a, 2020b; Fabbi, 2020), though they continued their missionary work rather than self-isolating at home, after an initial quarantine period of 14 days (Newsroom, 2020c). Even the spring and fall 2020 General Conferences, each of which “usually attracts more than 100,000 people” to Salt Lake City, were moved entirely online (Rowan, 2020). In the spring of 2021, the church still ran a virtual General Conference.
During the pandemic, the church utilized and encouraged the use of online technologies to continue its work while its members maintained self-isolation and social distancing. In April 2020, clear policies were established for how to conduct the work of the church online, such as leadership meetings, General Conferences, interviews, classes, funerals, weddings, and baptismal services. New, overarching technology use guidelines were also created (The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 2020d). Missionary work evolved into a strong online presence. Kami Withers, a missionary, described the evolution of the work online in a video: “It’s been really interesting to see how people are responding to that [online missionary work] versus how it was before where we knock on doors for like four hours a day and maybe get one person that lets us in. Here we post something, and people are actually coming to us” (Fabbi, 2020). The church continued finding ways to ensure that members could participate in church services through virtual or very small gatherings (e.g., the sacrament being administered in homes when individuals could not attend larger group sessions) (Newsroom, 2022).
Taking all of this information regarding the LDS Church’s stance on the use of technology, it seems that the response to COVID-19 created an even greater belief that online work is highly valuable in maintaining the participation of its members. It will be interesting to see whether this approach to conducting church work will continue strongly in the coming years since LDS members are now accustomed to online participation to a much greater extent than they were before. Despite this adjustment, there was still a cry from Elder David A. Bednar (of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints): “While believers and their religious organizations must be good citizens … never again can we allow government officials to treat the exercise of religion as simply nonessential” (Newsroom, 2020d). Elder Bednar held the belief that being together online does not quite qualify as “gathering” and was part of the disruption of religious freedom, as he saw it.
The Utah State Government versus UVU
There was also an interesting shift during the COVID-19 pandemic from feeling pressure from the LDS Church to feeling pressure from the state government. UVU followed the Utah system of higher education’s guidelines for phased returns to campus. These guidelines, though, were aligned with the state’s categorizations of risk. In Utah, that means a government that is predominantly Republican and LDS. So the way that many employees saw it was that our university followed the Republican approach to COVID-19, thus making our health and safety a political issue. Unfortunately, this played out in such a way “that the health of the state’s business was prioritized over the health of the public, as officials stopped slowing the spread of the virus and instead calculated how many sick people its health system could bear” (Song, 2020). Utah mirrored, in many ways, the national approach to COVID-19, with health officials steadily pushed away from the decision-making arena.
Multiple task forces and committees were created, of course, and they were given “a broad mandate to steer Utah’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic” (Dudley, 2020). Based on recommendations from these committees, Utah initiated “one of the more aggressive reopening timelines” (Dudley, 2020). Although COVID-19 case numbers were at the lower end by mid-May 2020, this “aggressive reopening” approach led to the highest numbers of cases and deaths in early to mid-July 2020 (Utah Division of Emergency Management, 2020). In late summer 2020, given the rising numbers of cases and deaths since the relaxed restrictions, Governor Gary Herbert issued Utah’s mask mandate (Utah Division of Emergency Management, 2020).
When the mandate was announced, both Salt Lake City (in Salt Lake County) and Provo (in Utah County, where UVU is also located) held rallies at which parents protested wearing masks and demanded in-person classes. These protesters crowded into small rooms without wearing masks (Tanner, 2020). Unsurprisingly, to those familiar with the Utah cultural and political climate, “the biggest difference [between Salt Lake City and Provo protesters] is the families pushing to return [to schools in person] in Salt Lake City are willing to send their kids back in masks to make it happen. At the larger and louder rally in the more conservative Utah County, not wearing [masks] was the point” (Tanner, 2020). Despite the pressure of the above external climate, greater educational conflicts arose because of the move online at UVU: students—administration—faculty. The central issue at play was whether the work of the university could be conducted effectively online.
Students versus UVU
In late spring 2020, UVU sent out a survey to students focused on their satisfaction with the newly remote courses. For many faculty at UVU, it was probably unsurprising that 63% of students surveyed professed that they were less satisfied with newly transitioned remote/online classes than they were with their face-to-face classes. Although faculty were not privy to the survey questions or any subsequent surveys, this statistic was utilized and shared by multiple individuals and various university departments. Through late spring 2020, we could not seem to get away from that 63% despite the recognition that, of course, the remote versions of courses thrown together over UVU’s spring break would be less desired than the carefully constructed original versions of those courses. Yet we saw the persistence of that 63% statistic used to push employees back onto the campus because of the palpable fear that enrolment would drop substantially in fall 2020 unless face-to-face courses were offered. Interestingly, enrolment in the fall did not take an expected hit, and instead UVU took enrolment hits in the spring and fall of 2021. In our own department, there was a scramble to justify faculty reassigned time because we were able to offer so few sections given the low registration numbers. Throughout the subsequent fall and spring semesters, to the intense frustration of many faculty, face-to-face attendance was extremely low, with many students opting to attend the classes virtually (UVU took the approach that half of the students would attend a class period face-to-face while the other half would attend it virtually; they would switch back and forth throughout each week).
Other conflicts arose over students’ access to technology. Some students struggled to complete their work remotely. Even though a few computer labs on campus remained open throughout the worst parts of the crisis, a public computer lab was not an option for many students who couldn’t work on campus but had relied on campus computers. Without the ability to use campus computers, students resorted to using their smartphones. Although they were better than nothing for completing academic assignments, smartphones were still challenging. Under tough circumstances, UVU tried to ensure that as many students as possible had appropriate computer access. Our IT office quickly ordered 300 laptops for students to borrow, and Student Affairs informed students that they could request funds to pay for services. The university also set up a system by which students could gain remote access to computer labs by requesting virtual private network access. It would enable them to use software installed on the lab computers from their own systems (Safety/Emergency Management, 2020).
By fall 2021, though, students (and the State of Utah as a whole) seemed to persist with a “getting back to normal” mentality, desiring face-to-face courses over online live-streaming or asynchronous courses. Despite the likelihood that many would be unvaccinated, they were also interacting in the public spaces on campus by not wearing masks. In fact, in Utah County, only 48.3% of residents were fully vaccinated by the end of October (Utah Government, 2021). UVU announced a vaccine mandate for 2022, though it was easy for students to receive an exemption because of medical, religious, or personal reasons. We suspect that the flexibility of this “mandate” was established because the university did not want to risk even lower enrolment.
Administration versus Faculty and Staff
Much of the early conflict at UVU during COVID-19 was internal, for different perceptions, health issues, political leanings, needs, and focuses led to disagreements. When COVID-19 hit the United States and Utah hard in March 2020, many of us at UVU were caught off guard. And an extremely hectic and stressful six weeks began. In the first week and a half, we received messages from the Provost’s Office regarding expectations of faculty, a steady stream of resources and training from the Office of Teaching and Learning, LinkedIn training and other “challenges” for us to complete from Human Resources, and stress-laden communications from departmental chairs and deans. Opening our email inboxes became much more of a chore, and we both became quickly overwhelmed. Ultimately, we ignored many of these messages because it was just too much to process. We imagine that students’ experiences of the same time were also challenging given the course modality changes and the barrage of communications from both the university and instructors.
When it neared time to assign course sections to faculty for the fall, our department started receiving updates from our chair that contained conflicting information. We would be teaching remotely; then only those of us at risk medically (identified by providing medical information to HR) would be teaching remotely; then we were encouraged to teach remotely and online. Just over a week later, though, Academic Affairs and the Provost’s Office switched gears. We felt like we were on a swivel: we had to make quick changes in instruction without any meaningful say in those changes. The shifting messages became very frustrating, no matter how understandable the uncertainty was. Additionally, some faculty were apprehensive about face-to-face teaching because of our own health issues and the likelihood of student conflicts in the classroom with consistent mask wearing and social distancing. Previously mentioned low enrolment was evidence that students wanted face-to-face classes, so Academic Affairs urged departments to offer at least 25% of their classes as face-to-face or face-to-face/hybrid. Suddenly, faculty who wanted to avoid the campus were being pressured. It started to feel as if our administration was more concerned about enrolment than employee and student safety.
By following the directives of the state government, including the Utah system of higher education, UVU’s administration appeared to be aligning the institution with the Republican approach to COVID-19 (Meyer & Ebmeyer, 2020; Vaught, 2020), which risked the reopening of the university becoming a political issue rather than one of safety and health. By spring 2021, though, the tune changed a bit. There was talk of creating more permanent remote working conditions for some employees and keeping a higher number of online courses than we had that first spring. Now that UVU was set up for virtual work and classes, the institution saw solutions to the previous space and parking problems. It was an interesting side effect caused by COVID-19.
Within Utah’s conservative environment, UVU struggled to balance the desires and needs of employees with the desires and demands of students and the state government. By fall 2021, some faculty were required to request official accommodations in order to teach virtually because state legislation developed a law demanding that at least 75% of each institution’s courses be offered face-to-face. Although it was the Utah state legislature that created this requirement, the conflicts that arose were focused on UVU administration and employees.
Conclusion
We are committed to understanding and explicating various and multiple conflicts affecting both our pedagogy and our students. We remain aware that the myth of the digital native persists in higher education. We also remain aware that there are students who are indeed digital natives as well as digital strangers. The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted such descriptors, not only for students, but also for UVU faculty. What is more, the university’s vacillation on the types of course delivery required a re-examination of our pedagogies, specifically our online pedagogies, and how such changes, in course delivery and content, affect students, a majority of whom must also contend with abiding by the church’s messages about digital technology, the increased digital delivery of courses, and the incorporation of digital technology platforms into courses.
As all instructors know, how we facilitate instruction either online or in classrooms is affected directly by educational policies, university guidelines, and individual departmental goals. But the intricacies of that facilitation are a matter of pedagogy and, in our case, the additional condition of working at a public, open admissions, Mormon-dominated institution. We are not guided by the church, but our visible and invisible positionalities as outsiders do guide our pedagogy, which, in our department, includes the incorporation of digital technologies into both how to complete assignments and the submission of those assignments. We understand how our choice to incorporate digital technology into our curriculum might sometimes be in contrast to the guidance of the church, but it is our goal at least to introduce students to digital technology platforms, and we would be remiss if we did not do so. We know that various digital technology platforms are vital, not only in higher education, but also in our students’ professional endeavours. We are earnest in our attentiveness to the various pedagogical needs of our students, even when those needs might invite conflict. Unfortunately, it makes the kind of co-creation described by Vorstermans and Mohler in Chapter 10 of this volume even more difficult. However, though conflicts are many and equally problematic, conflict has never been a reason for educators to turn away from practices that ultimately benefit students long after their time in our courses.
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