Closer to the senses in post-pandemic teacher training – Reclaiming the body in online educational encounters

Linköpings universitet, Avdelningen för lärande, estetik och naturvetenskap Linköpings universitet, Utbildningsvetenskap SPRINGER 2023

This study qualitatively examines synchronous online encounters in Swedish teacher education, learning from the distance and hybrid mode triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic, conceptualized as emergency remote teaching. The separation of bodies in such online teacher education challenges participants’ sensory involvement and how they can be “present” to one another. The aim of this study is to scrutinize body-sensory dimensions of presence to enlighten online encounters in teacher training in circumstances of emergency remote teaching, as well as in contemporary and future online teacher education, generally. Online encounters were documented by video recordings during online seminars and lectures, and by diary entries and focus groups with eight teacher educators and their students. With inspiration from a posthumanist problematization of communication and post-qualitative methodology, the analytical process puts the concepts alterity and attunement to work with the data. Results show that online teaching encounters provides an altered body-sensory situation to which participants sensorily attune in different ways, bringing both positive, and troublesome affects. Different sensory attunements further involve exploiting some body-sensory dimensions (i.e. vision) when others are concealed. When performing teacher training of all levels through emergency remote teaching/online teacher education, awareness of how the material setting of online encounters affects the body and thus the didactic conditions for building meaningful relationships in the study environment, is important. Since the lived body has a key role in teachers’ professional becoming, the study suggests a critical, creative consideration of its full sensory, along with further, qualitative expansion of online teacher education.

Online teacher education; Emergency remote teaching; Online teaching; Social presence; Body-sensory; Posthumanist; Post-qualitative; Pedagogical Work; Pedagogiskt arbete; Article in journal; info:eu-repo/semantics/article; text

10.1007.s10639-023-11952-w

Open access content. Open access content
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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UPE oai:DiVA.org:liu-195977
0000-0003-1182-2213
0000-0002-3115-9060
doi:10.1007/s10639-023-11952-w
ISI:001009394300004
1416061062

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