One of the major aims of integrative humanities is creating cultural structures to negotiate with any new/unforeseen events. The classroom experience during the pandemic and the withdrawal period, is one such unforeseen situation. This paper, which is a crossover between a research article and field notes, is an attempt to apprehend and articulate the nebulous experience of classroom instruction during the period immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic. It seeks to make sense of the dual-mode instruction/learning experience in the researcher’s own classroom by focussing on human-technology relations in the classroom, using the post-phenomenology framework. This is based on the assumption that technology integration in the classroom, and the issues related to it, is a useful heuristic device to understand the spectrum of cognitive-affective responses witnessed in the classroom. The specificity of the paper/field notes, which describe/s a COVID impacted classroom in a specific geographical location, with a particular demographic profile, and a certain kind and degree of technology-integration, it is assumed, would help understand the classroom dynamics, due to two crucial factors: The crisis has yielded a `new normal` that makes visible the often invisible procedures, practices and patterns of behaviour in the `normal` classroom, and secondly, specific classroom anecdotes, and theory-informed reflections on these could help formulate meaningful, and valid generalizations. These generalizations could contribute to the production of socially usable knowledge, knowledge that could contribute to the efforts to create cultural structures to face the unforeseen future, ushered in by a multitude of natural and man-made events and phenomena, with technology in the lead.

Authors:
Samson Thomas, The English and Foreign Languages University, India

About the Presenter(s)
Prof. Samson Thomas, Senior Professor, and Dean Academics is keenly interested in language learning and equity in access to learning resources, and has just completed a project on the education of girl children in India.

See this presentation on the full schedule – On Demand Schedule

Bookmark