The intellectual and emotional engagement required for reflective writing constitutes a kind of thorough and careful analysis that is particularly in keeping with the ethos of SoTL and especially useful in capturing for ourselves and sharing with others the experiences, outcomes, and challenges of learning and teaching in higher education (Bryson, 2014; Hamshire et al., 2017).

Enabling teachers not only "to know these things" but to share them in serious ways is what a scholarship of teaching is about. Ultimately, the measure of success for the scholarship of teaching movement will not be the degree to which it can--by focusing on the "many layers of practice" at the heart of teaching --discover solutions worth implementing, but the extent to which it is successful in discovering problems worth pursuing.

My instructional decisions were the result of serious reflection; I was not happy with my course and wanted to make substantive changes before the second session. Though there were variations in the responses, the overall tone of the feedback was different in session two. While more than half of all comments from session one could be classified as negative or neutral, less than 10% of the responses in session two could be considered such. This is by no means a comprehensive or definitive list of strategies but rather a concrete example of teacher decision-making that can lead to improvements in student attitude and performance.

I was accustomed to talking a lot in my large lecture classes (with eighty-plus students), knowing that the students (mainly juniors and seniors) could punctuate my lecture by answering my questions, and to presenting material in my smaller classes for philosophy majors, knowing that those students would regularly interrupt with queries. I was used to good student evaluations of my teaching because, well, I am moderately well-organized, I key my talk to the material they should have read, I'm reasonably friendly, and they like my accent. But the passage [from a book by Derek Bok] hit home because I recognized my own talk as a way of evading responsibility of ensuring they were fully engaged, and it crystallized that the more I talk, the less I know what is going on in the students' heads. I wondered hether my high student evaluations might reflect the soft bigotry of low expectations.

The nexus of these transformational issues requires a new way of seeing and not unseeing what needs to remain visible. This is where the hope lies. The pandemic has been an MRI exposing the social bones (Roy 2020), an X-ray making it possible ‘to see all the broken places’ (Wright 2020). Thus, our reflections of Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL) in this paper illuminate multiple and coexisting forms of inequality in higher education. While this might seem hopeless at times, recognising care as repair embraces the notion that ‘when people [and indeed systems] confront their failures, they have the opportunity to mend them’ (Wright 2020). Clear analysis of the complex shape of the terrain is essential, as is resistance. Harder to grow, yet fundamental, are the seeds of community, collaboration and commitment which can restore and recreate a deeply damaged sector.

Let’s welcome different, varied, messy stories,

Take risks, share moments of struggle,

Be bold and courageous, personal and vulnerable,

Create, transform, reflect, perform,

See beauty and tragedy,

Accepting our humanity in the academy.