Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic caused educational institutions across the world to face a new reality: when teachers and students do not share the same physical space (fractured ecologies), drastic changes in the everyday procedures and routines of teaching become an immediate necessity. In this paper, we trace some of the effects of this new situation in online classes of three experienced university teachers in the early days of the pandemic. We zoom in on dimensions of the classroom interface such as: turn-taking procedures, socialization, peer scaffolding and feedback; strategic footing changes across institutional and conversational roles; joking and humor. Not surprisingly, we found that the systematic absence of multimodal contextualization cues like gaze direction and tracing the origin of sound/speech were a trouble source in these online multiparty settings. We also saw, however, that teachers and students were successful in reinventing themselves and in devising new ways to deal with the changed circumstances. We end the paper with a number of implications for research into the classroom interface, both online and offline.
Highlights
The big things reside in the small things, and the most inconspicuous and uniquely situated social action is, in that sense, “systemic” and “typical”, as well as a source for theoretical generalization. (Blommaert et al 2018, p. 5)In this paper, we investigate data from online classes taught at a large university in the Netherlands during the COVID-19 pandemic
We investigate data from online classes taught at a large university in the Netherlands during the COVID-19 pandemic
We take a close look at interactional situations where hitches, disfluencies, and misunderstandings arise as a result of the discrepancies between conventional expectations of what would have happened () in face-to-face (f2f) classroom settings and what happened in the ‘new’ online situation—as well as at examples of situations where teachers exploit the affordances of the online setting
Summary
The big things reside in the small things, and the most inconspicuous and uniquely situated social action is, in that sense, “systemic” and “typical”, as well as a source for theoretical generalization. (Blommaert et al 2018, p. 5). Our focus in this paper is on detailed descriptions of what insiders do, cannot do, or organize differently in online classes—and to what effect—as a result of the different and novel constraints and affordances that obtain in online teaching/learning situations In this way, we aim to make a modest contribution to the development of an ecologically validated awareness of the details of classroom multiparty practices—both in the online and the offline condition—as well as offer some tentative practical suggestions for the solution of the practical problems experienced by teachers and students in COVID-19 times. Goffman’s insights are especially relevant for classroom multiparty settings where teachers as hard-pressed functionaries often have to perform many tasks simultaneously: keep the lesson agenda moving; monitor and synchronize and orchestrate the interactional behaviors of many; ‘read’ the classroom (cf Blum 2020) They may, for example, briefly bend down to whisper an off-record remark to a student who is at a loss (collusion; McDermott and Tylbor 1983) while keeping others on hold. We will investigate how teachers deal with the additional system constraints (Goffman 1981) of the online condition: whether, over time, they succeed in developing compensatory strategies to deal with them or maybe even turn them into affordances by creating novel discourse domains
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