The materiality of the virtual professorial ‘self’ in pandemic Zoom teaching: a mnemonic ethnographic method

Abstract

ABSTRACT With the shift to Zoom instruction during the Covid-19 pandemic, the professorial ‘self’ of many faculty was primarily experienced as virtual. Understanding the virtual professorial self is fundamental to the dialogical teacher-students relationship in synchronous teaching. As additional forms of technology inevitably are brought into synchronous teaching, the professorial self is situated within human, non-human, and more-than-human relationships. This paper presents the novel method of mnemonic ethnography to access and understand the materiality in the intersubjective consciousness of the virtual professorial self of digital teaching. We explicate mnemonic ethnography’s materialist orientations and practices including how mnemonic ethnography creates memory as data. The approach is illustrated through our study of the virtual professorial selves of faculty who used Zoom to teach during the pandemic. We suggest that mnemonic ethnography can reveal the materiality of virtual synchronous teaching in ways that guide us in navigating the future of online university education.