The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) shifted the paradigm of higher education in Finland and throughout the whole world. This paper is a phenomenological study that explores students' and teachers' experiences of studying and teaching during COVID-19 lockdowns in the lived space. The point of departure lies in the question: "What happened to us?". The focus of this study is on learning as an embodied and collaborative experience, where meaning-making takes place in a creative and interactive process. The corporeality of classroom learning is manifested in gestures, facial expressions, and embodied encounters in space. However, when learning is confined into the two-dimensional sphere of a computer screen, the embodied and sensuous aspect of communication is impaired.Qualitative data collection was conducted on students' and teachers' focus group and individual interviews at the level of university of applied sciences. Apart from being observers, the authors are also positioned in the study as teachers who lived through COVID-19 online teaching and learning and thus carry a subjective memory of disembodiment and existential loneliness in front of a muted screen.Finally, on a cognitive level, online teaching was efficiently organized in Finnish tertiary level education. Yet, the pandemic has left embodied memories that need to be addressed for understanding the collective experience and emotions surfacing from online learning during crisis.
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