Revenge of the Hashtag: Teaching with and against the Online Environment

Colette Gordon and Carrie Timlin

Since the onset of the pandemic, and the move to remote learning, attempts have been made to approximate face-to-face classroom teaching on digital platforms. ‘Theatre of Blood’, a second-year semester-long course taught in the Department of English Literature (requiring students to read and engage with three Renaissance revenge tragedies) was designed specifically for the digital learning space, structured to deliver an all-online reading and writing intensive seminar without compromising the academic integrity of its content or interaction with lecturers and peers.

Moreover, the all-online modality was taken as a vital opportunity to refocus teaching and learning on the activation of multimodal narrative literacies through a nontraditional approach to teaching and assessment, addressing a significant weakness of standard discussion and essay-based teaching (and of students learning through these methods) - an intervention likely to encounter greater resistance in blended modalities where standard forms and expectations predominate.

We found that all-online teaching drawing on students’ familiarity with everyday virtual interaction shifts the relationship between students, and between students and lecturers, and impacts how they engage with the course material and intended outcomes, both positively and negatively.

Our presentation traces the full arc from the beginning of the process to the end, trying out different strategies and techniques, with particular attention to how the official virtual learning environment of the university’s LMS (Canvas/Ulwazi), conferencing tools (BBB), annotation software (Hypothes.is), and independent messaging platforms (WhatsApp) shape behaviours and the various (and complex) ways that social media habits can impact teaching and learning.

Type of Contribution

Presentation