INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUES IN COVID-19

Abstract

This paper explores how conversations about digital culture, innovation, and online pedagogy can inform practices accentuated during the pandemic. The immediatism adopted by universities around the world due to the urgency of lockdowns is problematic in many ways. Firstly, the little time to switch to an online environment, advance online delivery, and ensure assessment is undeniable. Second, the extent to which universities were at different levels of digitally ready infrastructure and related staff and students’ development, training, and readiness to learn and teach remotely is also challenging. However, research shows the important role of digital culture in pedagogical choices inside the classroom, as much as it considers how individuals cope with technological innovation in their daily online practices. From a Freirean perspective, pedagogy is reflective and transformative and online pedagogies can reconceptualize knowledge and practice, minimize physical and intangible spaces, and redefine time, constructing new ecologies of learning for an inclusive pedagogy. This paper addresses the above by presenting data from interviews with instructors, administrative staff, and students at three universities in Brazil, Canada, and the UK. This qualitative study uses intercultural concepts of pedagogical innovation, and how participants have adapted their practices in digital culture. We further explore the pedagogical implications of their attitudes towards online learning, the reconstruction of their self-awareness, and aim at corroborating future comprehensions on how COVID-19 will impact higher education. This paper is timely in problematizing concepts that are important to understanding and dealing with digital culture, innovation, and online pedagogies in learning contexts post-COVID.