In this narrative paper, we explore our coming-of-age as amateur intellectuals through our collaborative engagement with reflexivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Situating our reflective acts within technology and our educational contexts we address and analyze feelings of persistent tug of war between despair and hope. Through collaborative autoethnography, we challenged our perceptions and investigated our views on educator identity as “teachers†to challenge perceptions of educator roles and responsibilities. We discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic response narrowed the role of the teacher, ultimately diminishing and destabilizing teacher identity while limiting their sense of agency. We draw on our collective experiences during the pandemic to draw a thread between the pandemic response’s effect on teaching and teacher identity, a conflicting awareness of both complicity and resistance, and our battles with the despair of necessity. By engaging in collaborative doubt and reflexivity, we discovered that we were consistently instilled with an astonishing sense of hope within our community.
The growing global attention to online learning, particularly in light of COVID-19, has spurred interest in systematic, robust, and pedagogically sound approaches to online learning like the fully online learning community (FOLC) model. FOLC consists of three overlapping dimensions—social presence, cognitive presence, and collaborative learning—which can function within fully online or hybrid digital spaces. FOLC thus supports the establishment of vibrant online learning communities. This chapter extends prior theoretical and empirical work on FOLC and highlights supportive and challenging academic interactions. Readiness to work within FOLC environments requires developing a range of 21st century competencies, such as complex problem solving and social negotiation, to effectively use the selected digital affordances and collaborate with others. These abilities and potential readiness interventions are addressed here as an intrinsic part of the model. The chapter concludes with reports of several empirical studies that explore the efficacy of the FOLC model.
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