Congratulations to Dr Jinna Tay and Dr Shobha Avadhani for being awarded the FASS Staff Research Support Scheme FY2020 grant for their project “Emergency remote teaching and beyond: A media studies approach towards understanding student affect and emotional presence in online learning.”

The pilot project joins a growing body of work that seeks to make online learning more effective for students, aiming to respond to the global COVID-19 Emergency Response Teaching (ERT) by examining a gap in the pedagogy of Community in Inquiry framework. As media and cultural scholars, both of them believe that the methods and knowledge from their discipline allow them to expand the focus from the always-important best practices for educators, to the lived realities of students who are immersed in digital and digitally-shaped spaces every day.

They want to know what this digital everyday is like, and how the emotions, relationships and experiences it contains are brought by students into the learning space. Their digital ethnography involves student participants recording video diaries as they experience an unprecedented full semester of emergency remote teaching.

They also want to trace the lasting impact of the affective footprints left behind by students and educators grappling with sustaining their learning communities during a pandemic. The larger study that they hope to mount on the basis of this pilot will draw more educators into the conversation about how emotion and experience in a digital-material environment could translate into critically conscious, empathetic and vibrant online learning communities.

For more information or possible project collaborations, please contact Dr Jinna Tay or Dr Shobha Avadhani.

Other news >>