When a Phenomenon-Based University Course Went Online: Students’ Experiences and Reflections After Sauna Bathing

Abstract

This chapter presents and discusses results from data in form of learning diaries that a group of Finnish students wrote on a distance university course arranged during the COVID-19 lockdown. Initially, the course was planned to take place at a World Heritage site, but because of the pandemic, it had to be released online, and in the students’ own outdoor surroundings with limited physical interaction between the students. The first version of the course was run before the COVID-19pandemic, but it had to be totally modified first to an online version, and then to a hybrid version during the pandemic restrictions. For this reason, the World Heritage site as learning environment and focus had to quickly incorporate a current Finnish Cultural Heritage, the sauna bathing culture, in the course. The students were instructed to write or record their diaries in the form of stream of consciousness after their sauna bathing or other bathing, and these diaries were used as data in our study. The theoretical approach of the study is phenomenology, and we analysed the diaries employing hermeneutic/interpretative phenomenology. The result shows that the sauna diaries were a successful course element that made it possible for the students to express themselves and reflect on their daily lives in a critical situation, but also to reflect deeply on the course, and their own role in that context.