Teaching Care During Covid-19: Reflective Assessment for Becoming-Historians (original) (raw)

Pedagogy of Care: Building a Teaching and Learning Community

Slavia Meridionalis , 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic shook the educational system to the core. Teaching moved from the classroom to the private space of teachers and students. The unexpected move to digital teaching and learning rendered “in-person” interaction impossible, forcing all of us working in education to reconsider what responsible pedagogy should look like during a crisis. In this article, we first elaborate the main ideas of the pedagogy of care. Then, we offer examples of teaching and learning during the pandemic from our personal experience of literary and language scholars, based in Serbia and Poland respectively. This experience has been shaped by our pedagogical choices and informed by our epistemological and ethical standpoints.

Critical Pedagogy in the Time of COVID-19: Lessons Learned

2021

The abrupt closure of universities due to the coronavirus pandemic caused unprecedented challenges for educators. They struggled to transition to online teaching almost overnight. This has raised questions about the readiness of Higher Education for digitalisation and hybridization of learning environments and focused attention on the renewal of teaching and learning models. It is incumbent upon those who practise critical pedagogy to join this conversation; the mandatory transition has raised difficult questions around how to ensure continuity of an agenda to offer students humanistic and democratic learning experiences in the new virtual reality. In this paper I offer a critical analysis of my journey through this period where I recount and deconstruct the difficulties and tensions that arose as I struggled to make my online classes conducive to critical pedagogy. I share how I learned to navigate and reshape initially oppressive, nonhuman spaces into democratic learning communiti...

Locked in and locked out: Covid-19 and teaching “remotely”

PROSPECTS

Covid-19 has rendered education "remote", opening a chasm in space and time between teachers and students, between how teaching and learning was practiced before and how it is practiced now and for the foreseeable, uncertain future. As many educators find themselves both locked in and locked out, this article seeks to sort through the implications of this remoteness. The article builds on the work of William F. Pinar and George Grant, to argue that technology is an ontology shaping how we encounter who we are and the world in which we live. Caught within the tightening circle of a Covid-19 environment predicated on keeping our distance from one another, while we are connecting technologically, at risk is the complicated conversation, as well as attunement, that lie at the heart of teaching, even as teachers know that it is only through improvisational variations on these that one can hope to chart an ethical course forward.

A Wake-Up Call: Equity, Inequality and Covid-19 Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning

Postdigital Science and Education

Produced from experiences at the outset of the intense times when Covid-19 lockdown restrictions began in March 2020, this collaborative paper offers the collective reflections and analysis of a group of teaching and learning and Higher Education (HE) scholars from a diverse 15 of the 26 South African public universities. In the form of a theorised narrative insistent on foregrounding personal voices, it presents a snapshot of the pandemic addressing the following question: what does the ‘pivot online’ to Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL), forced into urgent existence by the Covid-19 pandemic, mean for equity considerations in teaching and learning in HE? Drawing on the work of Therborn (2009: 20–32; 2012: 579–589; 2013; 2020) the reflections consider the forms of inequality - vital, resource and existential - exposed in higher education. Drawing on the work of Tronto (1993; 2015; White and Tronto 2004) the paper shows the networks of care which were formed as a counter ...

Lived Experience of Online Teaching During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Implications for Curriculum and Teaching

2021

As the COVID-19 pandemic has affected all sphere of human life and the schools across the country are closed due to the risk of spreading the virus, online teaching has become a major alternative pedagogical strategy among the private schools in particular. This article reports a study that explores how private school teachers perceive and adopt technological learning, how they transfer their technological knowledge and skills into the online classroom and how they self-assess their practices. This is done through a phenomenological study focusing on the meaning the participants make from their lived experience on ‘technological learning and application’ in the face of the pandemic. The study found that dealing with uncertainty and fear of the COVID-19 and the additional pressure for doing online teaching amidst the crisis evoked frustration and anguish among the teachers. Despite a number of challenges and crisis, teachers, however, learn to deal with the technological challenges a...

Emergency Remote Teaching and me: An autoethnography by a digital learning specialist during Covid-19

Studies in Technology Enhanced Learning, 2022

In March 2020, WHO (2020) declared Covid-19 as a pandemic and most institutions embarked on Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). Central to ERT have been Digital Learning Specialists (DLS) who have been actively supporting teachers to make and sustain the transition. However, there has been limited research on their own experiences and perceptions during ERT. This autoethnography employs Mezirow’s Transformative Learning Theory as a conceptual lens, to look at ERT through the perspective of a DLS working in language education. The findings indicate that ERT challenged me to reconsider my premises and beliefs and grow as a professional. I also acknowledge that ERT, despite the challenges it presented, had a positive effect on digital language learning during the pandemic. Yet, concerns remain about whether education systems will embrace more pedagogically sound online learning approaches post-pandemic or whether they will settle with ERT.

Teaching History teachers during COVID-19: Charting poems, pathways and agency

Yesterday and Today, 2021

In this article I argue that Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) has necessitated and produced some transformative teaching methods, using the frameworks of Freire and hooks. However, I argue, that their methods are incongruous with this moment of online learning because of the 'invisibilisation' of the marginalised and vulnerable students, who can and do easily disappear into the void of online learning. This makes dialogic teaching (Freire) and teaching in community (hooks) impossible. I use examples of two undergraduate history and history method (teaching history) classes, specifically looking at the teaching methods and the assessment methods. I draw thematically on what the students produced in their assessments, analysing their texts (poems, creative essays, artistic submissions), looking at how they engaged with the assignment (method) and what emerged in the assignment, reading specifically for political engagement. In this discussion, I look at both the possibilities and the limitations of online teaching. Ultimately, I argue, that the limitations outweigh the possibilities of online teaching, and that there is a danger in claiming victories or even good teaching standards in this context. The danger is that the students who disappear are written out of the script of the University, and the promises (however precarious) that post-university life in South Africa offers. My argument here, using two specific courses as evidence, is thus a contradiction and a balance: for exploring this portal, and everything it offers, but pushing back vehemently against complete online migration because, in a country as unequal as South Africa, it is unethical, unjust, and anti-critical pedagogy.

The pandemic is our portal: Re-imagining teaching and learning in the time of Covid-19

APORTAL, VOL5, Special Issue 1, 2021

The Covid-19 pandemic continues to disrupt the global health care systems, trade, transportation, education and other critical sectors. Universities have equally been affected and are still trapped in protracted struggles regarding how to respond to the pandemic, while at the same time ensuring that teaching and learning, research and community engagement continue. In this paper, we offer some theoretical and empirical reflections on our experiences as teacher educators at a South African university. Through reflexivity and dialogic conversations, we foreground our teaching experiences as Curriculum Studies academics, in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. We draw on Arundhati Roy's concept of the 'pandemic as a portal' in (re)looking at the pandemic as an epistemic opportunity to reflect, re-imagine and reconceptualize teaching and learning, in a time of crisis. We argue that, although the pandemic has been a disruptive force in our lives, it can also be an opportunity to rethink the future of teaching and learning and ensure that no student is left behind. We end the paper with some empirical and philosophical future of teaching and learning during this disruptive moment.

‘Maslow before Bloom’: Implementing a caring pedagogy during Covid-19

Teachers' Work, 2021

The speed at which the novel coronavirus, known as Covid-19, spread around the world in early 2020, has been well-documented. Countries closed their borders, cities and regions went into lockdown, schools and businesses closed and hospital geared up for an influx of patients (Cameron, 2020; OECD, 2021; UNESCO, 2020). On March 25, New Zealand went into Level 4 lockdown, the most restrictive of the government’s alert level system. The school holidays, due to start on April 9, were brought forward two weeks to give the Ministry of Education and schools a chance to prepare for school-led home learning. A survey of schools highlighted that only half the schools in the country felt they could deliver learning fully online, with lack of devices and limited Internet connectivity being the major problems (New Zealand Government, 2020). Most schools moved into home learning on April 15 and continued until after May 18, when the country moved down to Level 2. On return, schools needed to alter...

Anchors away: reconciling the dream of teaching in COVID-19

Communication Education

This essay examines teaching failure in the context of COVID-19. It uses autoethnography to convey and explore the impact the pandemic has on teaching, as situated against and within my lifelong dream to be a teacher. I explore four performances as a teacher that resulted from the transition at my institution from on the ground to fully remote instruction. Overall, I consider the ways COVID-19 has disrupted what it means to participate in communication instruction and to be a teacher, more generally.