Thinging teachers: gleaning nearness in dis/embodied eLearning through poetic inquiry

• Published in: Agenda (Durban) Vol. 36; no. 1; pp. 19 - 33
• Main Author: Peté, Marí
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 02-01-2022; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: College students; COVID-19; Distance learning; eLearning; Implants; Natural environment; nearness; Online instruction; performative interview; poetic inquiry; Preoccupation; Student teacher relationship; Teachers; Technology; things; Women
• ISSN: 1013-0950; 2158-978X
• DOI: 10.1080/10130950.2021.2010580

This piece aims to give glimpses of how we slide and dis/connect in embodied-virtual nodes and nets during Covid-19 lock-down, where lecturers reach from the virtual to be near students whom they normally care for in a contact university. Similar to how the concept of the global South helps us to look at the world in more encompassing richness, poetic inquiry contributes to insight by exposing diversity and difference and by grounding research in body and emotion − because traditional research might miss the grains within which the stories sing. I conducted performative interviews to engage through Zoom with three women lecturers from the Durban University of Technology, where I support staff in eLearning. For close to thirty years here, I have been ever-perplexed by how we are affected and how selves morph as we criss-cross the thin membrane between corporeal and virtual. Here, encounters are often out-the-box performances that ring with grit and great heart, as networks of tech and teacher perform feats to be near their students. Bearing in mind teachers in relation to technology as things, I explore nearness philosophically − Heidegger's (
1971
) preoccupation with "when the thing things", and then, how Irigaray (
1999
) extends this western philosophical concept into embodied, intuitive knowing. To understand and analyse this line of argument, I wrote poems rooted in my personal, visceral-virtual, but also natural world - thus implying that the divide between us and nature is fluid too: similar to there being no "bright red line" between us and our technological tools, as Jackson (
2014
, p.232) says in 'Rethinking repair'. While rightfully many current debates concentrate on Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies such as implants, these poems invite you to spot and think about more subtle, ordinary, often overlooked, "artefacts and forms of knowledge associated with women", to quote Judy Wajcman (
2009
, p.144).