Longing for connection: university educators creating meaning through sharing experiences of teaching online – CRADLE Seminar Series
22 June 2020
A large and active audience joined us online for the latest presentation in our CRADLE seminar series, as a panel of researchers and educators, including CRADLE’s Prof. Margaret Bearman and Dr Brandi Fox, explored university educators’ experiences of teaching online, using collaborative autoethnography to facilitate meaning making. Here, CRADLE doctoral student Bianka Malecka shares her reflections on the panel’s thought-provoking presentation.
The latest CRADLE seminar couldn’t have had better timing. As we have suddenly been thrust into the world of online teaching due to COVID-19, pausing to reflect on what it means for our practice and how it affects our sense of identity seemed almost therapeutic.
The seminar focused on a 2019 CRADLE project exploring staff perspectives of online teaching, which was co-facilitated by Margaret Bearman and Brandi Fox and included six other academics – Robin Bellingham, Andrea North-Samardzic, Simona Scarparo, Darci Taylor, Matthew Krehl Edward Thomas and Michael Volkov. Using collaborative autoethnography, the researchers engaged in a 12-week exploration of the interrelationships of the self and sociocultural context, in order to better understand what it means to be an online educator. Moving away from a dualistic framework of human/nonhuman and offline/online interactions, they identified five key themes related to online teaching: corporeality; constructing and materialising text; temporality; shifting practices; and transforming identities.
Educators’ experience of multiple shifts in an online space seemed to be the leitmotif of the webinar. Drawing on the concept of tech(no)bodies (McWilliam and Palmer 1995), Simona Scarparo discussed how the notion of presence in an online space is altered as educators’ explicit bodies give way to implicit ones. Educators become a voice or an image disembodied on the phone or computer screen, which can be quite unsettling. To describe the change in teaching methods and strategies to reach the online audience, Andrea North-Samardzic used an apt metaphor of theatre actors being forced to retrain as YouTubers. There was talk about a loss of control over when, where and how students are interacting with us and how they are materialising our texts. Discussions also focused on how the nature of online learning and teaching demands closer relationships with a broader community of learning designers, project managers and other academics.
The overall sentiment of the discussion, as noted by the participants in the chat, was that of mourning the loss of the familiar. However, as we are curating our professional identities in disembodied campuses and non-linear digital classrooms, we have an opportunity to establish new forms of presence and engagement. The exploration of how students negotiate meaning and space amidst these shifting energies might provide a valuable perspective to these discoveries.
For more of the panel’s research, you can follow several of them on Twitter: Brandi Fox, Margaret Bearman, Darci Taylor, Matthew Krehl Edward Thomas, and Michael Volkov. You can also follow Bianka @BiankaMalecka.
