Teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic: A collaborative autoethnographic exploration of emotions and the pedagogical process

Keywords: autoethnography, teaching, pedagogy, Covid
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 34

Abstract

Much has been written about how the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the teaching process in institutions of higher education and, more broadly, the functioning of these institutions. In this paper we extend this conversation by reflecting on our teaching experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and what these experiences can tell us about the pedagogical process during such societal disruptions. We are particularly focused on exploring the emotional dimension of our experiences and how emotions triggered by the COVID-19 disruptions influenced our approach to teaching, in the context of our institutional roles and obligations.
We employ an authoethnographic approach to explore these questions. While autoethnographies are typically written by a single author, we decided to write a comparative autoethnographic analysis of our experiences of teaching to produce “co-constructed narratives” (Alexander et al., 2012; Ellis & Adams, 2014). In doing so, we were interested to not only explore our individual emotional reactions to the large societal trends/events and how they influenced our pedagogical practice, but also to compare these individual experiences considering the different roles that we occupy in the university hierarchy, as a junior professor on the tenure-track and a tenured senior professor with a leadership role.