“You Will Have a COVID Baby?!”

A Mama PhD Candidate’s Critical Incidents

Abstract

In this article, I explore a disruptive shift to pandemic instruction in March 2020 and the challenges COVID-19 brought to my personal and professional lives. I use three autoethnographic vignettes, coupled with social media posts, to answer the following research question: How did the global pandemic affect my identity negotiation as a mama PhD candidate in physical and digital spaces and my choices as a novice teaching associate (TA)? As a methodological approach, this article employs the critical incident technique (Tripp) in investigating digital identity construction through autoethnographic writing (Hanauer). The findings show that the pandemic dramatically influenced my identities as a mama PhD Candidate and TA in physical and digital spaces. Self-reflections on my digital identity negotiation during the pandemic helped me understand students’ needs in terms of empathetic approaches to teaching, engaging students in personal types of writing, and providing spaces for students’ creativity and agency. Through reflexivity, I found meaning and accepted different experiences during the pandemic. The article concludes with the pedagogical implications of the benefits of autoethnographic writing.