Kevin Galloway and Emily Phillips Galloway

[00:04] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: Hi. My name is Emily Phillips Galloway, and I'm 38 years old. Today's date is Thursday, November 4, 2021. And I'm recording from Nashville, Tennessee, with Kevin Galloway, who is my husband and also my colleague at Vanderbilt University.

[00:21] KEVIN GALLOWAY: And hi, my name is Kevin Galloway. I am 41 years old and the same date and same location. So, Emily, we're here to talk about our experience with Covid-19 and the things leading up to it and our experiences. I first want to kind of start off, I want to ask you a question. When did you first realize the pandemic would radically change the world and our way of life?

[00:49] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: Well, I think that I first realized that the pandemic was as significant as it has turned out to be in the first few weeks when we would watch the evening news, and they started to make the predictions of how many american lives would be lost. And at that point, you know, the predictions were turned. What turned out to be significant underpredictions. So they were saying, you know, 400,000 american lives could be lost in the pandemic. And at this point, we've lost about 750,000 people. And so I think at that point, we'd never faced anything quite like that. And so that, for me, was pretty significant. What about you?

[01:42] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Yeah, it was interesting when I think back to what was happening at that time, I recall right before spring break, you started getting these. We were getting these news reports of Covid-19 and there was becoming more and more chatter from the university about being prepared to pivot online. But I remember, like, oh, no, I don't need to worry about this for many weeks, and hopefully we don't have to do it. But even at the time, I was thinking, how would I even do this? Like, move my class online? And I just remember, like, the first week when classes were back, you know, I was down in Florida for. For a workshop, and you were sending me these text messages. Like, students were sent home today. And I'm like, what? And I had to go online and, you know, see what was happening. And I think at that point, I, you know, this was, it was very serious that things were not going to be the same from that point forward. And I guess what fascinated or was mind boggling at the point was just how fast everything changed. Like, it wasn't a gradual sort of, kind of a gradual change. It was very sharp and sudden.

[03:02] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: Great. So in the course of the pandemic, what people, places, services have become most important to you?

[03:15] KEVIN GALLOWAY: I think in terms of people, you always value your family, but I think in these kind of extreme circumstances, you really see how important the family unit is. And during the pandemic, having, you know, all this opportunity to spend more quality time with, with, you know, you and Gwendolyn our daughter. So I think, you know, that was, you know, that became very important. And something I really cherished during this, during this experience. And I think we'll talk about this more. But I think the other thing, like, in terms of services, you know, there's being able to pivoting to more online tools and becoming more versatile in how to use these tools. We've used Google Hangouts before and Skype, and I'm sure people are like, what is Skype now? But using these online tools like Zoom and seeing the power of being able to connect with people anywhere in the world, now that everybody has these tools, it's so much easier to have these conversations or to reach out to a subject matter experts. And for our work education, working with students, trying to bring in other perspectives that before would have been very difficult to do. Now, if you want somebody in Romania to share their expertise or experience, it's so much easier to bring that talent or that experience to the classroom. Another thing I was just fascinated with was all the growth of collaboration tools. And you saw with some of my classes using mural, like an online collaboration tool, I got first introduced to some of the stuff in workshops, and having this was mind boggling to me at the time, but now I'm normalized to it. But having 100 people on a Zoom call and having everybody have stable video feeds, I was like, why wasn't this available earlier? But with the collaboration tools, where you have people again all around the world, sharing their insights and their own experiences all at the same time on a digital canvas, at that point, I was like, this is transformative. The ability to collect all this information so quickly is going to change how we do our work. How about you? What people and places or services have become most important to you?

[06:03] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: I mean, I think the pandemic really marked like a reset in terms of the way that I used a lot of my time and the professional work life balance. So prior to the pandemic, I was traveling pretty frequently. Maybe every other week I was headed somewhere for work. And with the pandemic, all of that travel stopped. And so I had a real opportunity to spend time during the day watching our four year old learn things, do new things. And so that opportunity was unexpected and really something that I came to value. The other thing that I would say is that these collaboration tools have also become really much more important to me. The first class that I taught online was in the second semester of the pandemic, starting in that January. And one of the things that was most striking about that course for me, that I was teaching on Zoom, sitting here in Nashville, and I had 16 students, all of whom were in China and in South Korea. And so I would start my class in the morning here early, and it would be the middle of the night for many of my students. And so they'd be sitting in their homes, some of them in their pajamas, some of them with small children, families behind them. And so it was a very different way to get to know my students. You know, I had always seen my students, especially my international students, embedded in a us context. And so I didn't have the broader contextual factors of their families, the homes in which they lived in the day to day life factors that they were grappling with because they were essentially transplanted here to Nashville. But the pandemic gave me the opportunity to see that. And now that we're returned to in person teaching, I think that's something that I'm definitely going to miss, is getting to know these students in their home context. And so that's an unexpected sort of gift of the pandemic.

[08:40] KEVIN GALLOWAY: And I guess thinking of other gifts, I mean, what brings you joy or amidst the pandemic?

[08:51] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: I mean, I think going back to something I said before, probably just the time to watch our daughter Gwendolyn learn new things. I had been a teacher before I was a university professor, and so I always loved watching people learn things. But there's something very different about watching your own child learn things. And before the pandemic, we didn't really have those opportunities to see her in school. But during the pandemic, we had a pandemic school at our house. We had another child, Austin, a preschool teacher, and our daughter in our kitchen learning for about a year and a half. And so that gave me the opportunity to see her every day putting together new ideas, to move from kind of abstract drawings to writing letters, writing words. And I never would have had that opportunity. And so I really got a lot of joy from that. What about you?

[10:03] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Yeah, I would say same stuff. And I think a thing that happened during this time is our daughter was about three. And as we got further in the pandemic, she got older. I, you know, became much more interested in the world around her. And it was interesting. It was fun being there to see her, explore her world, even when the world was our backyard and things got converted or named as the king's forest or the beach or the dentist office. For whatever reason, seeing her churn these, you know, spaces, you know, trees and bushes that, you know, are, you know, that's what it looks like to us, became, you know, places of imagination and curiosity, exploration for her. And it was fun, kind of, you know, becoming a kid again and going outside and, you know, helping, you know, convert some of those spaces into, you know, what. What she was imagining, imagining them to be. So I think, you know, being part of that, you know, pre pandemic, we never would have seen that. She would have been at daycare. We would have gotten home, and it would be dinner time and then time to decompress, do tub, and go to bed. So having that opportunity to be more part of her life during the day, during these big growing moments, that brought me a lot of joyous thinking a.

[11:42] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: Little bit about sort of the pandemic itself. Are there any moments that in your memory really stick out as sort of a peak pandemic moment?

[11:54] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Yeah, we were talking about this one, I think I feel like some of the peak pandemic moments were certainly sanitizing our groceries. I mean, never in my mind. If you had asked me in February of 2020, do you see yourself spraying, you know, wiping down all your groceries? And I'm like, no way. But at the time, with the information we had, we didn't know the surface life of Covid-19 so, you know, getting our groceries and, you know, not putting them on counters, putting on the ground, wiping them down. And that was certainly one of the peak pandemic moments. You know, I think other things just, you know, when you. During some of the peak time, when you're driving on the streets and the streets are just empty because everybody is home. I mean, the only times I would see stuff like that would be in the middle of a blizzard. But to see, you know, during springtime, weather is perfectly normal and nobody is on the street. It's kind of an eerie, you know, eerie experience as you're, you know, driving on the road and, you know, some other things, just like seeing. Seeing the empty shelves at the grocery store. Never would I have thought that there would be a shortage of toilet paper. You know, I guess it's a lot of things that you never would have expected as being something that would be tied to a pandemic.

[13:32] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: I still want to know what everyone's doing with that extra toilet paper. Still curious. So, Kevin, why don't you tell us a little bit about sort of the peak pandemic moments that you experienced?

[13:55] KEVIN GALLOWAY: I'd say early on, some of the peak pandemic moments were sanitizing our groceries on the floor, in our kitchen. I never would have imagined when I started the year 2020 that we would be sanitizing our groceries, that we would be driving on empty streets because everybody was working from home or quarantining or going to work. That, you know, that you would show up to the grocery store and that there would be empty shelves and lines in the grocery store, that there would be having to stand 6ft apart before you can even go in the grocery store and making sure the stores were not exceeding capacity limits. But I think going to the grocery stores and seeing bare shelves and, you know, seeing a shortage of toilet paper, I don't know. What were some peak pandemic moments for you?

[15:02] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: I think for me, a lot of my work has been with school districts, generally in person. And with the pandemic, we stopped meeting in person, but I was still interacting with colleagues in school districts on Zoom. And. And I guess what was sort of this peak pandemic moment for me was when we started hearing about the consequences at school sites. So we were starting to lose teachers, especially older teachers in the workforce, to Covid. And there were children who disappeared from the school system because they had no technology or way to connect with school. And some of those children are still lost. And so for me, that was sort of this peak pandemic moment of like, wow, okay, schooling is probably never going to be the same again. And the differential consequences for children in low socioeconomic resource families were just so dire that I remember sitting there thinking, you know, this to me, feels like a totally different world. And so that was, I think, really peak pandemic. And then personally, you know, the other thing that when I think about the pandemic that will always strike me is that we were in such a privileged position during the pandemic. And so, you know, I had periods where I realized I had not left my house for weeks, you know, and so, not being a frontline worker, we had the privilege of being able to stay home, but realizing that, you know, my world that had been very expansive had suddenly more or less become contained in the house, and that the contacts I was having with people, I was interacting with people all over the world. It was all happening, actually, from the room I'm sitting in, which is a small space above the garage. So it's this very strange kind of collapsing of the home life and the work life into this tiny bundle of space where everything was done within the confines of our home. And so for me, that will always be sort of this peak pandemic sense of things.

[17:48] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Yeah, certainly a turning point, right, in how we get things done. And I guess this kind of leads in another good question. How do you see life being different going forward? I mean, we're starting to see it now as we are kind of getting out of Covid-19 but how do you see things being different going forward?

[18:10] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: I mean, I guess when I think of life being different, I remember in January, before the pandemic started, in that first year, I was interacting with students in China in person. You know, everyone was here in Nashville. And I remember students talking to me about the pandemic that was starting in China and about their fears about that. And I remember very glibly offering assurances that that would never happen here, that, you know, in the US we had avoided the SARS pandemic as well as a few others in sort of the decades before. And I sort of had this, which now strikes me as bizarre but blind confidence that things like this didn't happen in the US. And now I don't think that. So I think sort of an ongoing skepticism about the safety, security, public health, infrastructure is something that I will take with me from this pandemic. And I think I'll never be as glib as I was then in thinking that these things wouldn't happen here. I think also Covid-19 coincided with a period of reckoning around racism in this country as sort of an endemic feature of social life. And I think the world around us has changed in the way we think about race in the broader ether. I think in universities, we were always having these conversations, and now they've become much more part of a public discourse. And so I think life post Covid-19 requires a set of different conversations about social justice that we're all having. And I think that's a really valuable and powerful thing. What about you? What do you see being different?

[20:47] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Well, I think we've talked about some of this, but the connectivity, I think it's, I mean, I think there was always this blur between work and being able to shut stuff off devices. But that, that boundary or between work life balance, I think, is a lot fuzzier because now it is so much easier to jump on, join a meeting at seven in the morning if you need to, to meet with colleagues or jump on a call late at night, because they are international and it makes it easier to connect with them. Then transforming the work life balance going forward, I think it's going to require maybe new skills about how do we find that personal time to disconnect and be able to have those connections with people, physical people. But I guess another thing, I think everybody has gone through this, has had their own challenges, and I guess I'm hopeful that, having had this shared experience, that people have a better understanding for the perspectives, everybody else's experiences, and we could take learnings from this. I also think when you are presented with a challenge, that the next challenge you have, you have a datum like, oh, it was never as bad as Covid-19 you have some confidence that, you know, the next challenge is something that you can take on.

[22:34] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: Yeah, I mean, I think that's. That's definitely true. And I think that raises this question of, like, when you think about life post pandemic, I think it sometimes makes us reflect on life at Vanderbilt in particular, pre pandemic. And are there any things that you think you will really miss about Vanderbilt pre pandemic now that we're living in this post, or hopefully post pandemic world?

[23:09] KEVIN GALLOWAY: I guess I think a lot of this stuff with my work in the innovation center, a lot of it is connecting with people. And I think pre pandemic, a lot of the connections happened through personal connections. We call them creative collisions. You're just walking by and somebody's in a meeting, and you jump in, you say hi, and then you get introduced to somebody new. I think during the pandemic, it was much harder. You had to be significantly more intentional about how you interact with people because you had to schedule an appointment, you had to send the Zoom link, because none of the engagements we had were in person. And I guess going forward, you know, I think. I think, you know, I think. I think it'll be. I think it's going to be good. I think there's going to be a hybrid. There will still be the in person connections. But again, with the ubiquity of these tools that everybody has access to, we can jump on phone calls with, you know, collaborators, you know, around the world with ease.

[24:24] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: You know, I think the thing that I miss most about pre pandemic life is probably at Vanderbilt, I felt like my teaching superpower was that I was really good at relationship building, having those, you know, connections with my students. And now that we've returned to in person teaching, there's still sort of a barrier, I think, in our interactions we used to host at our home. At the start and the end of quarters, we'd have a celebration, have a brunch, invite our students, and spend that time, meet their partners or their children. My students from China would bring dishes that they made that their mothers had taught them to make, or grandmothers had taught them to make. And we had those personal connections over time. And I feel like building those connections is much more challenging today because of the way that COVID protocols are still functioning, and I miss that part of it. And so I'm hopeful that, you know, as we have higher rates of vaccination, that that will be something that we can return to.

[25:48] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Yeah, I still get students who want to be reinvited to the maker brunch, you know, because we would hold a maker brunch at the end of each semester. And, you know, I think there are students who, you know, miss that camaraderie and also just reconnecting with other past students, some that are alums now. So I'm hopeful that once COVID protocols are relaxed further, that we can return to a lot of our pre pandemic activities.

[26:22] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: In terms of thinking about the pandemic, what are you most proud of in terms of the accomplishments that you had during the pandemic?

[26:33] KEVIN GALLOWAY: I mean, I think, you know, I'm most proud of a bunch of different. Different categories, you know, within our family, being able to create a safe learning environment for our daughter, and, you know, being able to, I guess, weather all of that uncertainty. And because there's a lot of, you know, I think one of the biggest challenges was all the uncertainty, all the doom and gloom on the news. And, I mean, I just remember just sitting and just listening, watching it, like, in my head, when is this going to end? And, you know, there was no answer. There was. It was unclear when all this would, in theory, be over. But I'm glad, you know, I'm a, you know, very proud of how we handled it and how we were able to weather the worst of it. You know, I think, you know, from an engineer's point of view, you know, early on in the pandemic, you know, being able to rise to the call to action, we had, as you know, we had some colleagues in the medical center who expressed concern that, and this is like week two in the pandemic, that, you know, there could be a shortage of ventilators. And, you know, was there anything that Vanderbilt could do to be prepared? And so, you know, working with colleagues in the medical center, in the engineering school, and going from a napkin sketch of a low cost ventilator to fully ready to deploy, you know, 100 parts on hand to make 100 units in five weeks, you know, that was a phenomenal team effort. It was exhausting being up till two and three in the morning, working on cad designs, prototyping stuff in our garage, trying to figure out what is the configuration that works, but just kind of leveraging just the tools and resources. We had a. A lot of it at home to come up with a solution to a potentially big problem. And, you know, I mean, I'm proud of what we created in such a short period of time, but I think, for me, therapeutically, you know, being able to do something about it, rather than just kind of feel like this powerless person, listen to all the doom and gloom. But, you know, as a person who likes to build and create and solve problems, it was certainly the best creative outlet for me to channel all those energies towards something that I think could be of high value.

[29:20] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: Yeah, lots of pool noodles. Lots of pool noodles were destroyed in the process of making those ventilators and windshield wiper motors. I mean, I think Gwendolyn won't remember this, um, but we had those ventilators running in our basement for probably eight weeks. Eight weeks. Right. Just to see if it could keep.

[29:46] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Going, just do the cycle testing. Yep.

[29:49] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: And so you would walk into the basement, and you would hear that, um, sound for. For quite a while. So, you know, I guess, definitely.

[30:02] KEVIN GALLOWAY: And what's also interesting is just even in the midst of all this, the people that also roasted the call, I mean, having donations of windshield wiper motors from Nissan reaching out to makers in the Nashville area to help assemble these things, the time that was donated by local companies to help fabricate these components. And a lot of this was just making a phone call, and I. But, you know, as soon as you explain what you were trying to do, everybody was willing to help and to put in the time and the energy. So it was, you know, it was a network of people that I sort of had before the pandemic, but it is a network of people I know much better through this shared experience. And, you know, I think that's. That's something I always take. Take with me after this is all over.

[30:55] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: Yeah. I mean, I think, for me, what I'm most proud of is not only, you know, our family sort of continuing to flourish through the pandemic, but, you know, professionally, when the pandemic started, we paused a lot of our projects, but we use that time to design curricular materials for an intervention for multilingual kids. And we took the time that we had to create something that, in the end, I'm really proud of. And I think as we started to implement it in schools this year, we have about 400 kids using it, 25 teachers. I'm really proud of the work that we did because post pandemic, one of the things that we desperately need is high quality instruction. And teachers have really experienced a significant amount of trauma, as have children. And anything that we can do to provide materials that can be used to instruct students, I think is a really powerful way to contribute to this post pandemic recovery. And so I'm proud of that work because it definitely was something that had we had a shorter timeline, if we had not had the pandemic, I don't know that we would have had the opportunity to design something as robust as what we were able to design. And so that was sort of an unexpected silver lining of the pandemic. So thinking about the pandemic, is there anything that you would like to forget that you wish you didn't have to remember from the pandemic time?

[32:57] KEVIN GALLOWAY: I mean, I think the, I would like to forget all of the uncertainty that happened during that time. It was just, I don't know when you're like, for example, during this, we're working on the ventilator. I mean, I had to go out. I had to go and engage with people masked up, but there was always this underlying concern, like, I don't want to be, I don't want to bring this back to the home. And so just this taking extra precautions at every turn to make sure I was not putting myself in position to bring this home. So, you know, that was, you know, that kind of level of stress is something I'm happy to forget about from the pandemic. I mean, I think another thing is just not seeing family. It's, you know, it's been too long since, you know, our daughter has seen, you know, you know, grandparents and, you know, I'm looking forward to near term visits here, but it's a, you know, it's, you know, it's a part of her life that they have missed. And I'm looking forward to ending this chapter.

[34:14] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: Yeah, I think for me also, I'd like to forget the uncertainty that was the pandemic and just the incredible amount of trauma that people were experiencing. So, I mean, I feel like we were so lucky through the pandemic in that we didn't lose anyone close to us. We were able to keep our jobs, but that was not true for so many. So I'd like to forget that for sure because, you know, I don't think there's ever been in my lifetime probably a momentous where the collective cultural trauma has been as shared. And I think, you know, I would like to think that we will leave this period with more empathy or cultural understanding, but I'm not certain if that will be true. And, you know, I think we're going to have to spend a significant amount of time thinking about how we help, help children and help adults to process that trauma. I think it's going to be an ongoing question for all of us. I think luckily, our child was small enough that she sort of got through this unscathed. But kids who are a little bit older and are a little bit more aware of what was happening around them, I think will carry this with them. And so as much as I'd like to forget that piece of the pandemic, I also think it's the part that we're going to need to continually come back to culturally to think about how we recover from that significant, ongoing trauma.

[36:16] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Yeah, there's certainly going to be ripple effects for many years.

[36:21] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: And so sort of thinking about kind of the, this isn't a question on the list, but I guess what are you most hopeful for at the, I wouldn't say the end of the pandemic. But as the pandemic starts to look as if it's beginning to wind down, what's your biggest hope coming out of this period?

[36:51] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Biggest hope? I mean, I don't know if it's hope, but things I'm looking forward to exploring more. You know, I think with our almost five year old, you know, I feel like she's had the existence of, you know, being on a small farm in an isolated area. She hasn't had the opportunity to see the world even just, like, outside the state. So I guess I'm looking forward to exploring and sharing, sharing places we like and showing her around. I think that's what I'm hopeful for, to start resuming that. How about you?

[37:37] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: I'm excited to do those things, you know, and I'm really hopeful that the conversations that started this year and the year before will be conversations that will continue and will change the world that she will live in. You know, I think questions of social justice and equity are, you know, central to a lot of the work that we do. And I've always, you know, hoped that the world would be a different place for her. And I think that the pandemic has been a period of creating the opportunity for, you know, the world to be different. And I don't know, if that, if those changes will happen. But I think we can always be hopeful that they might. And so, you know, coming out of the pandemic, I'm really optimistic that the world will be different.

[38:49] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Me too. We can ask. Got one more question, maybe. Although I think that's a great point, great place to end. But what is, what has been the biggest obstacle for you during the pandemic? And I think we probably covered points of this already.

[39:19] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: I think the juggle right of work and family as sort of the separation between those two things collapse. I think we were in this kind of uncharted territory of needing to negotiate day to day life with a young child and working simultaneously. And so that brought some really unique challenges that I think we've grappled with, and I think we've done really well. That was certainly, at least personally, one of the biggest obstacles. What about you?

[40:05] KEVIN GALLOWAY: Yeah, I mean, I think the biggest obstacle pretty much throughout is just letting go, letting go of control, and you just had to let go whatever plans you had, just be prepared to have to pivot and change direction. But, yeah, I think just dealing with all the uncertainty for such a long period of time, I don't know, at some point, you just kind of get used to it. And you said, let's just keep going with the flow and do what you can, the best you can and pivot where you need to.

[40:50] EMILY PHILLIPS GALLOWAY: Yeah, I think that's definitely true. And I think those lessons in pivoting will be important. Right. I think as a culture and as individuals, we've had to do so much of that, and hopefully it's an agility that we are able to use in the future and a set of skills it.