Contradictions and Predicaments in Instructors’ Boundary Negotiations of Students’ Health Disclosures

ABSTRACT

Students often disclose personal health information to their instructors for a variety of reasons. This puts instructors in an awkward position where they must negotiate the students’ disclosure and what to do with the information. The authors conducted in-depth individual interviews with 23 university professors and identified three recurring tensions in the ways in which participants discussed their responses and actions based on student health disclosures: (1) encouraging and discouraging student disclosure, (2) changing and maintaining the instructor-student interactions based on the disclosure, and (3) personal involvement and professional detachment in responding to students’ disclosures. For instructors, communication privacy negotiation is more than a negotiation of privacy boundaries and co-ownership of information on the part of the instructor; it becomes a form of self-preservation and personal health navigation, which then dictates future interactions of instructors when students disclose personal health information.