This wasn’t how LaShawnDa Pittman expected to give her final exam review: At her kitchen table, laptop open, coffee cup at the ready, her 12-year-old Chihuahua named Espresso by her side.

But as the first week of the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s shift to online classes drew to a close, , an assistant professor of American Ethnic Studies, was talking with her students over the conferencing platform Zoom, first to answer logistical questions about the upcoming exam, then to provide a refresher of some of the themes of the course. For this class, African American Families, that meant revisiting some key historical developments and public policies from the Civil War to the post-civil rights era.

Navigating the technology effectively has been a learning opportunity for everyone, Pittman said afterward, but the university’s decision to cancel in-person classes for the remainder of winter quarter was the right thing to do “for the health and well-being of everyone on campus.”

“I’m trying to be as flexible as I can with all of this,” Pittman explained. “There’s a lot of anxiety among students. I’m trying to end the quarter in a powerful way for students, to try to be as compassionate and make this is as easy as possible for them.”

Around the UW, faculty in every department, school and college made a change in plans. School of Music instructors conducted lessons over FaceTime. In the Jackson School of International Studies, guest speakers visited over Zoom. A doctoral defense in the School of Oceanography was livestreamed, with audience members occupying every second seat. And School of Public Health Dean Hilary Godwin has been holding “town hall” webinars on all things COVID-19.

, an associate professor of architecture, wrapped up his winter-quarter Research Design Studio from an empty classroom in Gould Hall. On the wall-mounted monitor, his students presented, group by group, their proposals to revamp six Seattle neighborhoods. At quarter’s end, there was to be a celebratory event — a panel discussion with local officials and planning professionals — but that has been postponed indefinitely.

It’s been a challenge, Mohler said, to translate what is normally a hands-on class, in a room filled with posters of housing prototypes, scale models of city blocks, and the chatter of student groups. Viewing their digital models on a large-screen monitor — rather than a student laptop in class — is a definite plus, he said. But the shift to an all-online environment means continual adjustments.

“A potential silver lining in this crisis,” Mohler said, “is that we are being required to adopt remote conferencing tools we might otherwise ignore.”

Students have been adapting, too — concentrating on lectures via Zoom and Panopto, “visiting” instructors in online office hours and submitting questions to discussion boards. None of the technology is completely unfamiliar, students say, but the totality of it — every lecture, every assignment, every question, every test — has taken some getting used to.

“It’s been a big learning curve,” said freshman Hannah Lee as she studied in Odegaard Undergraduate Library last week. “There’s definitely been some limitation in not being able to work with other people on whiteboards, or to have them write things out. But Zoom meetings are nice, because we can share screens. My TA was able to pull up her screen and write out what she would have written out on paper for us.”

Freshman Zage Phillips likened the shift to online classes to a public health experiment.

“I’m glad that they’re doing this for people who are high-risk, but I think that it’s a good test to see if we can keep it contained,” Phillips said. “But I think that the results will only show us if it actually worked in the future. I think only time will kind of tell.”

While combing through the stories of African-American slaves for her forthcoming book, LaShawnDa Pittman found one narrative that launched a project of love.

As Pittman read of the beating death of an elderly woman named Sarah, she realized: This woman was a grandmother. Sarah may have cared for her own grandchildren while their parents worked in the fields, and quite possibly watched over the children of a white plantation owner as well. Sarah likely was a woman who played an important role in two families, yet she suffered a brutal death at the hands of an overseer.

Pittman wondered: How can I share her story beyond the book I’m writing? Why were the experiences of black grandmothers not reflected or represented in an increasingly digital world?

The narrative of Sarah led , a UW assistant professor of American Ethnic Studies, to establish a website, , where she features living and oral histories about grandmothers, gathers a list of memorable grandmother quotes, posts stories from contributors and invites newcomers to do the same.

Already in the throes of research into her primary areas of expertise, race and poverty, Pittman had studied the growth in and reasons for grandparents raising their grandchildren. (A 2011 Pew Research Center found that black children are at least twice as likely to be cared for by a grandparent as are children of other races and ethnicities.) African-Americans not only are among grandparent-headed households, but they also are more likely than their white counterparts to be poor and to have impaired health while caring for their grandchildren.

But after reading one too many times that black grandmothers’ lives today are qualitatively different from their historic counterparts, Pittman began to question how this is known, with so little scientific evidence of black grandmothers’ experiences throughout history.

So Pittman began a new study to examine the varied lives of African-American grandmothers, and the multifaceted ways in which they have been— and are yet — involved in family life from slavery to the present. She’s writing a book on how black grandmothers humanize, reconstitute and hold together their families, given legal, social and economic constraints in society over time. The website showcases many individual stories.

“Black grandmothers are nuanced,” Pittman said. “Nobody is all of anything.”

In the five months since the website has been up, one point is clear:  There are plenty of stereotypes — think Aunt Jemima, Tyler Perry’s Madea, or really, most any grandmotherly character from TV — but in real life, there’s no one type of black grandmother.

“This group tends to be so stereotyped, even within the black community. We romanticize them — they’re tough, they’re caregiving, they’re holier than thou,” Pittman explained. “But nobody lives up to the ideal of the ‘traditional grandmother’ we’ve created.”

There are historical and societal reasons for the creation of a “traditional grandmother,” she added. Systemic racism and economic hardship pose unique threats to the stability of African-American families. During slavery, they humanized familiesin a system that treated African Americans as property, Pittman said. After slavery, it was grandmothers who reconstituted the family and maintained family ties through reunions, church and child-rearing. ”

Today, “Grandparents step in when parents are unable to meet a child’s needs, and in the black community, it’s not assumed that they always can. Raising children is a collective endeavor, and grandmothers are key to that collectivity,” she said.

Yet despite the variety of experiences in black families — the grandmother in a two-parent, middle- or upper-class family might be involved in different ways than one who is raising her grandchildren — a concept of the all-encompassing grandmother has evolved.

Pittman’s website, collects and displays images, stories and even one-liners (example: “It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to!”) to share the many personalities and experiences of grandmothers, from the perspective of the women themselves, or their grandchildren. A South Carolina chef describes his 90-year-old Grandmama Mary and her Gullah “tones.” Artist and educator Natalie Daise recounts the obstacles her grandmother Elizabeth overcame to become a nurse, an artist and a poet. Musician Kelly Price writes about her goals for her granddaughters.

And Pittman adds short tributes to her own grandmother, who helped raise her after her mother gave birth as a teen.

She wants the site to appeal to all ages, for a variety of purposes.

“I hope that like other archives that hold the stories of African-Americans, Real Black Grandmothers can be a useful educational, historical, and even inspirational tool for generations to come,” Pittman said.

, an assistant professor in the ����Ӱ�Ӵ�ý’s Department of American Ethnic Studies, interviewed 77 African American grandmothers living in some of the poorest areas of south Chicago. Her were published in November in the first issue of The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences.

Pittman’s research underscores the challenges those caregivers face, including dealing with divided loyalties between their grandchildren and their own children, navigating the complications of getting state resources they desperately need and sacrificing their own well-being in their determination to take care of their grandchildren.

The majority of the grandmothers Pittman interviewed, who ranged in age from 38 to 83, had annual incomes of less than $15,000, though more than half were employed. Fifty-eight were raising children in informal arrangements and were ineligible for funding under the state child welfare system. Benefits available to parents were also often out of reach, and public assistance aimed at seniors was inadequate to cover the costs of childrearing.

“They fell through the cracks in ways that have real ramifications for them,” Pittman said.

And their ranks have swelled. The number of children living with a grandparent in the U.S. has by 22 percent since 2000, rising sharply during the Great Recession. The rise can be attributed to a host of factors, from incarcerated parents to unemployment, inadequate mental health services and substance abuse, Pittman said.

Grandparents are now the primary caregivers for more than 2.9 million children nationwide, Pittman notes, and two-thirds of grandmother-headed households live at or below the federal poverty line. Black children are twice as likely to live with grandparents or other relatives as are white and Hispanic children, but Pittman said since the Great Recession, white grandparents are now the fastest-growing subset of grandparent-headed households.

Pittman’s paper highlights the strategies grandmothers devised to keep grandchildren in their care without jeopardizing subsidized housing, such as keeping children’s names off leases to avoid being disqualified for senior housing. In some cases, grandmothers were not getting benefits available to them or were jumping through unnecessary hoops to access services because they were misinformed.

In most situations, parents either failed or refused to contribute financially to their children’s care. In one case, a daughter left her mother to care for her 2-year-old daughter without transferring the child’s public assistance payments — leaving her mother without any formal support or income. And in some cases, parents removed or tried to remove their children from a grandmother’s care to get subsidized housing or resources the child was eligible for.

Child care was another challenge. One grandmother quit her job because she couldn’t find child care and had to rely on unemployment income and help from friends. Another was prevented from seeking a job because she couldn’t afford child care. She couldn’t get subsidized care, since she wasn’t her grandchild’s public assistance payee, and transferring those payments might have jeopardized the child’s safety if her mother took her back to claim the benefits.

“We often think of grandmothers as child care providers, but when they’re parenting children, they’re also child care consumers,” Pittman said. “So how do they acquire child care for their grandchildren when they’re normally the people that parents leave the children with?”

Pittman conducted her research while pursuing a doctoral degree at Northwestern University. She initially set out to investigate the support networks available to inner-city children, and grandmothers kept coming up in her research. She spent the better part of four years visiting grandmothers in their homes, accompanying them to doctor’s appointments, going to church with them.

Pittman was struck by the magnitude of their poverty and the poor health many were in — she recalled one grandmother in her forties who had her granddaughter leave the front door unlocked for Pittman because she was unable to get down a flight of stairs to open it.

“I was interviewing grandmothers who were raising grandchildren from recliners because they could barely get around,” Pittman said. “I was talking to 40- and 50-year-olds who could barely walk, for a variety of reasons.”

But Pittman also noted the resilience of many of the grandmothers.

“Even though raising their grandchildren is really hard, they wouldn’t have it any other way,” she said. “One of the big things I heard was, ‘My grandbaby won’t end up in the system. If that means I’ve got to make these kinds of sacrifices, that’s just what it’s going to be.’”

Some efforts are trying to address the shift in demographics. have been established in about 15 states, including Washington, to help connect intergenerational caregivers with services and deal with complex family dynamics.

Pittman said while the kinship programs provide a valuable service, more resources are needed to help the millions of grandparents struggling to raise their grandchildren.

“Our current safety net programs aren’t set up to deal with this increasingly common situation,” Pittman said. “Understanding people’s challenges and experiences is the first step to rethinking how we might better serve some of our most vulnerable households.”

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.