Louise Phillips (JCU Singapore), Kate Coleman (University of Melbourne), Geraldine Burke (Monash University)
Abstract
Teachers are at the frontline in ensuring learning continues during COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, though there has been minimal consultation with teachers. At very short notice, teachers across all sectors have needed to significantly reconfigure their teaching and practices. The changes in education are global, urgent and look to alter education practices from this point onwards. It is a time of rapid innovation, novel partnerships, and enhanced questions of access. As a group of educational and arts-based researchers (networked via online platforms) we recognised that these changing practices needed to be documented and analysed urgently to support teaching and learning within these less familiar social configurations remotely and locally. Through an online qualitative survey we have gathered hundreds of teacher’s experiences of the effect and affect of COVID-19 on teaching and learning located in Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Singapore, and the USA. In this presentation, we share how we are beginning to interpret the survey data by playing and curating with digital humanities/ data science tools voyant and omeka. We talk about what these science tools are enabling us to see and how we may begin to see opportunities to create/ make art with the data to draw attention to matters of concern in teaching and learning in COVID-19. This is emergent work in progress.
Presenter Biographies
Associate Professor Louise Gwenneth Phillips (JCU, Singapore) and Teaching & Learning in COVID-19 times project lead. Louise has more than 30 years of experience working with children across various settings, as an early childhood educator, storyteller, consultant, researcher and tertiary educator. Her research interests include storytelling, children’s rights and citizenship, arts and rights based pedagogies and methodologies, decolonizing methodologies, sensation and place.
Dr Kate Coleman‘s (MGSE, Melbourne University) work focuses on the integration of digital pedagogies and digital portfolios for sustained creative practice, assessment and warranting of evidence across education sectors. Kate’s praxis includes taking aspects of her theoretical and practical work as a/r/tographer to consider how artists, artist-teachers and artist-students use site to create place in digital and physical practice.
Dr Geraldine Burke (Monash University) is an artist, researcher, teacher-educator lecturing into visual and creative arts education at Monash University (Melbourne and Singapore). As an art-based educational researcher she engages with artistic practice, pedagogy and community projects. She has an enduring interest in how local knowledge, place and immersive a/r/t (art, research, and teaching) develop across kindergartens, schools, seniors and community groups.