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Talking about online teaching, face-to-face University of Sydney, Australia
This activity session will run as a readers' theatre. The script is written; I now need bodies to articulate the words and e-motions of these familiar academic characters, as they express the pleasures and frustrations of their online teaching over refreshments at a fictional University Showcase. The characters are based loosely on colleagues in my research. The script is partly imaginative, and part verbatim, drawn from the conversational transcripts of my research into academic identity and online teaching. Come and give voice to an academic who teaches online! Give body to a group of lecturers who spend a goodly part of their time - in between face-to-face seminars and lectures - in their offices, reading students' posts and emails, typing their responses, and smiling like this :-) The post-reading discussion may lead us back into some of the issues these characters connect to their online teaching, including:
• collegial suspicion and denial ('They can always find the negatives, can't they?'),
• invisible bodies with burgeoning workloads ('One of the things it does is just increase the sheer volume of stuff that we have to deal with')
• resistance to WebCT ('Online, you really lose the ability to give them energy').
This session is an opportunity too, to reflect on the relational ethics of university teaching (and learning) which, at least in traditional embodied modes, continues to be an essentially social activity, organised around interactions and encounters that challenge us 'to awaken to the face of the other' (Levinas, 1969). | |||||