Teaching in the time of COVID. Issue 1 (1st August 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Paul, Lissa; Ferretti, Heather; Lee, Veronica; Shoalts, Kerry
• Is Part Of: Book 2.0. Volume 11:Issue 1/2(2021)
• Page Start: 81
• Page End: 93
• Publication Date: 2021-08-01
• Subjects: Book industries and trade -- Technological innovations -- Periodicals; Publishers and publishing -- Periodicals; Book design -- Periodicals; Electronic publishing -- Periodicals; Books -- Periodicals; Periodicals; 070.5
• DOI: 10.1386/btwo_00045_1
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2042-8022

Abstract

This essay arose as a response to teaching the final post-graduate course in the taught master's programme of the Faculty of Education at Brock University (St. Catharine's Ontario Canada) in the spring and autumn of 2020, just after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic triggered the complete closures of schools and universities. Three students wrote about their relationships with teaching in the time of COVID. An experienced middle-school teacher discusses how the transition to suddenly homeschooling her five-year-old focused her attention on distinctions between curriculum-driven education and maternal teaching. A newly graduated teacher, concerned about the complete cancellation of extra-curricular sport programmes researches their histories. She discovers the ways in which intercollegiate sport, especially in the United States, transformed what had been healthy competition between undergraduate teams of students into multi-million-dollar businesses driving university revenue streams, eclipsing academic life and exploiting student athletes. In the United States, with academic institutions limiting or prohibiting in-person instruction in 2020-201, basketball and football teams competed. COVID spiked and people died. A nurse-educator, faced with the sudden requirement to remove of all nursing students from their required clinical placements at the onset of the pandemic writes about recalibrating the relationships between virtual experience (including simulations) and practical experience in nursing instruction. Given the vulnerability of clinical placements to sudden closures (SARS in 2003 had been a warning), the nurse-educator explains why it is time to determine which programme components could best be moved online. The contributions by the three students are framed by the professor's own adaptation to an online environment, including her development of asynchronous iMovie instruction combined with short synchronous seminars (with no more than five students at a time) and one-on-one tutorials.