This paper presents a reflexive analysis of how university educators experience the shift to increasing online teaching in 2019. We explore what it means to be an online educator in contemporary higher education and aim to raise questions about how we approach online education and understand ourselves as educators, informed by a sociomaterial lens. The research utilised collaborative autoethnography (CAE) to facilitate meaning‐making and uncover complex perspectives through collaboration and conversation. This enabled us to question what we as educators were losing and what we were gaining as a consequence of shifting to more online modes of teaching via university mandated platforms and processes. Through this methodology, various themes emerged: the role of corporeality; how we constructed ourselves through texts; how others materialised us in virtual spaces; the experience of online time; and our transforming practices and identities. This paper provides a snapshot of a significant cultural milieu in academia as we were afforded time to engage in reflexive practice about teaching online just as the academic world was abruptly mandated to shift almost wholly online. It also provides unique insights into the significance of understanding ourselves as both embodied and social, and the importance of community within academia.
What is already known about this topic
Higher education's shift online, both before and during COVID, has had a substantial effect on university staff, including discomfort and loss of agency.
What this paper adds
Considering the material and embodied is important in online education, particularly because it can be taken‐for‐granted and hence overlooked.
Feelings of disconnection can result from the inevitable gap between how educators represent themselves online and how others perceive (“materialise”) them online.
Experiencing a lack of connection with online students provides the opportunity to question assumptions about student experiences and develop more nuanced online teaching practice.
Teaching requires some kind of reconciliation between the linear time as laid out in learning design and the not‐yet‐here/always‐there time of online learning.
Implications for practice and/or policy
Attention must continue to be paid to the experiences of educators as even experienced ones find teaching online disturbs identities and practices.
Collegially sharing virtual spaces may assist university educators in making sense of the shifts demanded by online teaching and allow more active modelling of meaning‐making processes for students.
Teaching may benefit from deliberate consideration of developing online personas and reflection on how to accommodate them within academic professional identities.
This article is the beginning of a theoretical reading of a project undertaken by the Public Pedagogies Institute a Pop Up School and Educational Consciousness. Drawing on Biesta’s notion of publicness we initially describe the Pop Up School event. We argue that in this project we look to extend the way the knowledge profile of an area can be more fully informed by turning to the community itself for their articulations and representations of their knowledge. When then offer distinct readings of this research/public event with Deleuze and Barad as they offer a dynamic engagement with knowledge. The paper then moves between the small space of the public event and the larger space of Footscray through Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal cosmologies and pedagogies. Time is called then into play as a psychoanalytic reading of Footscray, memory and knowledge are read from the interview data. The final steps bring Footscray sharply through time with a reading of ‘consumptionscapes’ of Footscray knowledge.
This experimental writing piece by the Earth Unbound Collective explores the ethical, political and pedagogical challenges in addressing climate change, activism and justice. The provocation Earth Unbound: the struggle to breathe and the creative thoughts that follow are inspired by the contagious energy of what Donna Haraway (2016) calls response-ability or the ability to respond. This energy ripples through monthly reading groups and workshops organised by this interdisciplinary collective that emerged organically in January 2020.
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