(Life) Writing to Belong: Teaching and Learning on Camera during a Pandemic

Abstract

Teaching life writing in on-line platforms during two stages of the COVID-19 pandemic has been more effective in raising my awareness of the inequities elevated by face-to-face teaching than any IT training I received to prepare for it. When it led me to actively challenge and (I dare hope) silence, my own inner skeptic, I could see how administrative policy impacted my students’ sense of belonging in their virtual learning spaces. Pandemic-time transitions to online learning became the ideal case study for us as I spent much of the term considering the transactional nature of negotiating the disclosure of self-identifying information and prepared for an increasingly hybrid world rather than an assumedly in person one. Whether we know it or not, online teaching is a social justice practice and it continues to evolve as such as long as instructors and students become more aware of how the tools of remote learning alternately amplify and challenge biased teaching practices in the academy. Seeing and being seen in our private spaces, put into practice what we teach when we study life writing as acts of witness, testimony, and belonging. What it taught me---and what I am still learning---is to anticipate a future of teaching forever changed by the COVID-19 pandemic, a future in which instructors and students continue to be mindful that agency and access are always already issues of crisis for many students and instructors. During the first term of the 2020–2021 COVID-19 pandemic, faculty and students at my small liberal arts college were given a broad range of teaching and learning tools with which to build synchronous, remote learning communities. All were invited to training webinars that aided in adapting our pacing, use of audio|visual aids, and other syncretic ways of teaching and learning. Faculty were asked to understand, accept, and support a wider range of ways of being present for teaching and learning more than ever before. After all, so many in our community had already contracted COVID, were caring for loved ones, or mourning their loss. https://doi.org/10.1080/08989575.2022.2154450