Together a Catalyst : Learning From Our Co-Creative Arts-Based Inquiry About Our Teacher Selves During the Transition to Online Teaching

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated many adjustments to everyday teaching at higher education institutions. While face-to-face lectures were the preferred teaching method of teacher educators prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the shift to online teaching was heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper draws attention to the shifts we transitioned to as teacher educators teaching and researching via online platforms-specifically Zoom—in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study explored how three teacher educators used co-creative arts-based inquiry to deepen their understanding of their shifting teacher ‘selves’ as online users. Object-inspired narratives and poetic inquiry were employed to co-flexively engage with our shifting teaching experiences and question our feelings of discomfort teaching online. Framed conceptually by an ethics of care and collaborative-creativity, we discuss the tensions and possibilities we experienced, and shared through our scholarly online conversations via Zoom to think through the shifts in our teacher selves and teaching. We highlight our online teaching experiences amidst the uncertainty and disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic. We then share the methodological insight of collaborative arts-based inquiry and how it facilitated reflexive dialogues and deep conversations that ignited self-learning and collective insights into the potential and possibilities of online teaching. Findings highlighted that co-creative, online engagement enabled sharing of emotional experiences and offered possibilities for transforming teacher selves. In addition, co-creative, online engagement enabled the cultivation of relational scholarly thinking. The article highlights the methodological insight of co-creative arts-based research in productively disrupting instrumental university discourse of online teaching.

Contextualising Our Study

It is often through moments of change, through meaningful shifts to our seemingly known world that we are invoked to (re)consider the spaces we inhabit, our movements, and the ways in which our bodies respond in such spaces ( Guyotte et al., 2018 , p. 103).

We, Jacqui, Daisy and Inbanathan (Inba) are three experienced teacher educators and researchers based at a School of Education at a research-intensive higher education institution in South Africa. We teach and supervise postgraduate research in Teacher Development Studies (Daisy and Jacqui) and Education Leadership and Management (Inba). Our collaboration around our passionate interest in artful epistemologies and methodologies began over 15 years ago through our postgraduate teaching and research projects. In our teaching and scholarship, Daisy and Inba have worked collaboratively and reflexively with visual and written narratives of self as academics working in higher education settings (Pillay et al., 2016, 2017). Over the past 4 years, Jacqui, Inba, and Daisy have worked together to open up understandings of self by exploring the connections with, between, and through objects (Pillay et al., 2017).

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we have found ourselves awakened to consider shifts in our professional selves as we suddenly transitioned to teaching and research via online platforms. We were swept into the online space “tumbling, stumbling, [and] stuttering” as we inquired pensively into what this shift to online work meant to each of us (Guyotte et al., 2018, p. 104). Drawing on arts-based methods, we collaborated in this co-creative scholarly inquiry to stay emotionally and cognitively connected to our academic work. We share our personal teaching experiences during and post-lockdown in South Africa from 2020–2022 while working online, adopting instrumentalist approaches mandated and regulated by our university. In 2020, the first year of our online teaching experiences, we had regular conversations about our discomfort and tensions around the changing nature of our new academic contexts. In 2021, we began this collaborative creative arts-based inquiry that initially took place weekly via the Zoom communication platform, where we shared and reflected on our online experiences using arts-based methods.

The process of engaging with arts-based methods cultivated creative spaces for us to reflect on our embodied experiences as we negotiated our personal-professional discomfort and tensions of working in technicist ways via virtual platforms at the expense of engaging with the complexity of pedagogical imperatives and implications of our teaching. To this end, our inquiry seeks new possibilities for understanding ourselves as ethically responsible teacher educators in the academy. It is open to reimagining our multiple selves to new experiences and possibilities of the virtual world through and beyond our scholarship.

While the primary focus of our study was initially an interest in the experiences of academics moving toward online teaching spaces, we realized that the methodological processes and propositions became integral to exploring and reflecting on our moves and the emotions we each experienced. Thus, our research question shifted from its original focus on panic and disengagement in our academic transition from face-to-face teaching to online teaching spaces to ask: How do co-creative arts-based inquiry productively disrupt online teaching spaces as teacher educators?

We commence the article by briefly reviewing how the pandemic necessitated changes in the mode of delivery of our teaching in higher education and its related impact on academics and students. Next, we draw conceptually on the theory of ethics and collaborative-creativity as the framing to make meaning of our online teaching experiences. Then, we explain the arts-based methods we employed to produce and analyse data in response to our research question above. Thereafter, we illustrate our research process by making visible how “arts-based inquiry [is] uniquely positioned” (Finley, 2008, p. 72) to open up our experiences to materially transforming self and our online teaching. Drawing on the reflections from a rereading of our object narratives, collective poems and transcripts of our conversations on Zoom, we then present a scholarly discussion of three learnings from our co-creative arts-based engagements in relation to negotiating the discomfort of online teaching during COVID-19. To conclude, we refer to our research question and illustrate how our inquiry may resonate with other academics facing similar crises.

Teaching in Higher Education During COVID-19

Owing to the virulence of the Coronavirus, higher education institutions throughout the world discouraged face-to-face teaching and swiftly moved much of their academic programmes online in order to ensure minimal disruption to the academic year. The migration to online platforms increased the stress levels and the workloads of academics who prior to the pandemic were already weighed down by burdensome teaching loads, research, and community service responsibilities (Rapanta et al., 2020). Several academics reported that without much experience in online teaching they had to speedily change their face-to-face classes to online programmes (Bailey & Lee, 2020; Telles-Langdon, 2020). Some academics lamented the disembodied nature of online pedagogies and their “inability to speak directly to students, to gauge their reactions, and adjust [their] teaching to their [student’s] needs” (Telles-Langdon, 2020, p. 112). While there may have been a smooth transition for students (many of whom are considered digital natives) in first-world countries to online pedagogies, in developing countries, such as South Africa, the shift caused untold technological problems for several students. Students reported not having laptops, lack of access to the internet, poor internet connectivity at home, and lack of expertise in using online technologies (Quezada et al., 2020).

Similar to other parts of the world, South African higher education institutions swiftly shifted to online teaching and learning in an endeavour to ensure that the academic year was not lost. The move to online pedagogies in South Africa “added a new layer of complexity and uncertainty to an already volatile and contested higher education sector, evidenced by [ongoing] protests on [tuition] fees, decolonisation [and Africanisation of curricula] and affordability [of higher education]” (Motala & Menon, 2020, p. 82). The speed at which universities had to make the transition to online teaching and learning left little time for institutions to capacitate academics on online pedagogies and for students to learn remotely. As Motala and Menon (2020), p. 90) observe, for academic staff it was “an incredibly steep learning curve” and for students an egregious level of under-preparedness. Given the legacy of apartheid and South Africa’s unequal past, the COVID-19 pandemic has intensified and made more visible social exclusion and other “societal comorbidities” (Fataar & Badroodien, 2020, p. 4) on teaching and learning. Le Grange (2020), p. 2) relates how the transition to online teaching “has laid bare the digital divide as poor students struggle with access to devices and/or connectivity”. Notwithstanding the strides made in transforming the higher education sector in South Africa, the lack of continuous access to online resources for those students who hail from deprived contexts has “further entrenched exclusion and created barriers to learning” (Motala & Menon, 2020, p. 90).

Ethics of Care and Collaborative-Creativity

The comfort-discomfort of transitioning to virtual platforms as teacher educators and online users opened up an opportunity for us to reposition ourselves as learners and to consider how we might explore creative ways of negotiating the everyday routines of our teaching. According to the etymological dictionary, discomfort means to “make uncomfortable or uneasy.” In this article, we seek to push beyond the comfort of the accepted marketable paradigms as online “classroom technicians” and to practice creative thinking for enlivening our postgraduate teaching and learning (Said, 1994, p. 74). Framed by the Theory of Ethics and collaborative-creativity, we practice opening up our teacher-educator selves and ways of thinking about the “technical and routine professionalized mode of interacting” online (Said, 1994, p. 74).

Repositioning ourselves as educational researchers we considered how we can creatively and care-fully transform our ways of thinking and reconnect with the situations we were encountering daily on virtual platforms set up by our university’s Information and Communication Systems. We were drawn to the theory of ethics and the care of self (Foucault, 1986) and Said’s representation of the intellectual “as an amateur…, performing beyond being faceless professional [s]” (Said, 1994, p. 11). Prompted by Said’s (1994) view of the intellectual as individuals who engage in more lively and radical ideas and methods, we chose to consider how our collaborative work as a practice of care in higher education, can open up opportunities “to take risks in creative endeavors, a process considered critical by many researchers in creativity” (John-Steiner, 2000, p. 79).

In this collaborative, arts-based inquiry, we risk-takingly enter in an “emotional zone of proximal development…with a mutuality and growth in emotional and intellectual domains” (John-Steiner, 2000, p. 145). Weber and Mitchell (2004) argue that arts-informed research methods offer potent ways for researchers to not only study, reread and reinterpret their personal and emotional experiences in novel ways, but sharing these as embodied enfleshments of self, provokes further reflections in provocative, memorable and accessible forms. Drawing on the help of others is necessary (Foucault, 1997, p. 236) and central to ethical practice.

The discomfort of leaving the lonely virtual space where we act as “a bunch of timid and jargon-ridden university dons” (Said, 1994, p. 70) to view our educational practice as a material, imaginative space for understanding ourselves as online users, was an ethical responsibility. This aesthetic ethical stance we take in this article to look back at the self as an experiencing being (Spivak, 2012) and to embrace our struggle, (Hooks, 2003) “through a kind of [artful]curiosity” (Foucault, 1988, p. 328), “particularly in correspondence with others” (Foucault, 1997, p. 243), is an exercise of care for the self. In this scholarly space, we experiment with object narratives and poetic texts as co-creative spaces for imaginatively practicing embodied enfleshments of the teacher educator in the company of like-minded arts-based educational researchers. Co-creativity and play for interrupting traditional hierarchies and familiar ways of thought as online users shifted us to value the process of doing and imaginatively practicing ways to understand who we are in the academic world in order to change it.

Together, drawing on the theory of ethics and collaborative-creativity, we were able to embrace a joyful, and hopeful position of agency as [intellectuals] capable of working on [our]selves to achieve new kinds of existence,” (Allan, 2013, p. 27). As arts-based educational researchers, our ethical responsibility to co-creatively think about our online educational experiences from a material and practice-based understanding opened up a scholarly space to resist the corporate ensemble and the guise of the technician as intellectual” (Massad, 2004, p. 7-8).

Our Methodological Positioning

Our study is grounded in arts-based research. Arts-based research refers to the methodical use of the artistic process, in its multiple forms, to examine and understand lived experience in all its complexities (McNiff, 2008). Rather than arrive at fixed notions of the world, arts-based research aims to enhance and open up our perspectives of phenomena and suggest new ways of viewing the world (Barone & Eisner, 2006). It seeks to raise more questions rather than provide fixed answers about lived experiences. When employing arts-based research, a range of linguistic and non-linguistic arts-derived methods are used at different points in the research journey including but not restricted to data generation, data (re)presentation, and data analysis (Barone & Eisner, 2006; Bagley & Castro-Salazar, 2012).

In our study, we drew on the arts-based methods of object inquiry and poetic inquiry to produce and (re)present data. (Turkle, 2007, p. 50) highlights “the power of objects to move us, to forge important new ideas and to link us to other people”. For Turkle, objects are evocative and can be employed to explore ambiguities or discover how objects or “things’ become more than necessities… and how we may literally become one with our objects”. Poetry, on the other hand, allows readers to engage in their social worlds in nuanced, in-depth ways and has the promise of being “a vehicle of researcher reflexivity” (Sherry & Schouten, 2002, p. 218). When poetry is combined with objects, it may offer opportunities for intellectual stimulation and creative ways of knowing (Wyatt, 2016). In this paper, we draw attention to the methodological insight of objects and poetry to reflect collaboratively on the uncertainty and change ushered in by the COVID-19 pandemic, which served as the catalyst to learn new teaching strategies and adapt to online teaching.

Our Research Processes

In our collaborative inquiry, we each commenced by selecting an object which best explained our experiences of teaching remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. Each of us crafted object narratives related to the connotative meanings of our chosen object (Riggins, 1994). Object inquiry allows for symbolizing the object and evoking rich stories of experience (Pahl, 2017). We thereafter met virtually, on 5 May 2021 via the Zoom platform to share our object narratives. Daisy selected a cup of coffee as her object and labelled her narrative: My cup of comfort: Learning to teach online during the lock-down. Below is an extract from her object narrative: (Figure 1)

Figure 1.

Daisy’s cup of comfort.

The foamy layer of tiny bubbles covering my freshly made Mocha Java, shifted and joined and formed new patterns. The patterns changed every time I took a mouthful of the comforting taste. I played with this layer of foam using my spoon and I realized I could create pleasing patterns as well. But the bubbles had an energy of their own. I watched them carefully as I contemplated lockdown and what it may mean for me and my passionate pedagogy... What could this mean for ‘me’ and ‘my students” How can we work with our fears, anxieties, and pain in our passion to rethink ourselves and make better choices for what and how we want to be...

Jacqui’s object was a cellphone power bank. An extract from her object narrative is reflected below: (Figure 2)

Figure 2.

Jacqui’s cellphone power bank.

The power bank is a portable charger that is designed and used to recharge electronic devices. Power banks use refined electronics to take in charge from a charger and store it in a battery, which is then used to charge other devices. During these difficult times, when I felt powerless and drained of inspiration and energy, I had to draw on the energy of my colleagues and family, who served as my power bank. I had to recharge my battery and be re-energised and empowered to engage in remote or online teaching.

Inba’s chosen object was a potted cactus given to him by one of his postgraduate students. This is an excerpt from his object narrative: (Figure 3)

Figure 3.

Inba’s potted cactus.

A small cactus pot plant, which one of my postgraduate students gave me as a gift, serves as a metaphor for my teaching experiences during the pandemic. Cactus in Australian slang means “beaten”, “finished” or “kaput”. At my university, there was a flurry of activity coaxing and cajoling academics to get their modules online. There were numerous online workshops on capacitating staff on online modes of teaching. The fears of the pandemic, coupled with being pressured into learning online modes of teaching within a short space of time was emotionally draining. At times, I felt beaten and kaput similar to the colloquial meaning ascribed to the cactus.

To condense our object narratives for meaning-making, we drew on poetic inquiry. As Langer and Furman (2004) attest, poetry is an efficacious device to reduce text into a meaningful (re)presentation of it. We chose the format of the French-Malaysian pantoum poem. Owing to its “repetition of salient or emotionally evocative themes” (Furman et al., 2006, p. 28), we thought this would assist us to identify and communicate what we saw as most striking and significant about each object narrative. We shared our poems through email.

Below is the pantoum poem constructed by Daisy.

Move, Connect, Seek Out and Energise

Move, connect, seek out and energise

Students and I face another unfamiliar complex day

Passion to rethink ourselves outside the lecture room

“Who am I” “Who am I as a teacher”

Students and I face another complex, unfamiliar day

Uncertainty and trepidation, unfamiliar and disruptive

“Who am I” “Who am I as a teacher”

Patterns changing bitter-sweet sensations

Disruptive Uncertainty and trepidation

Passion to rethink ourselves outside the lecture room

Patterns changing bitter-sweet sensations

Move, connect, seek out and energise

Jacqui shared the following pantoum poem she constructed:

Recharge, Revitalise and Empower

Recharge, revitalise and empower

All of a sudden, uncertainty

Immense shifts in teacher self and teaching

Embrace new digital technologies

All of a sudden, uncertainty

Innovate, inspire, motivate and collaborate

Embrace new digital technologies

Rollercoaster of emotional pedagogy

Innovate, inspire, motivate and collaborate

Immense shifts in teacher self and teaching

Rollercoaster of emotional pedagogy

Recharge, revitalise and empower

The pantoum poem constructed by Inba follows:

Relearn ‘Pandemic Pedagogies’

Teaching, my asset

Top of my game

Relearn ‘pandemic pedagogies’

Beaten and kaput

Top of my game

Panic-gogy rather than pedagogy

Beaten and kaput

Resilience and endurance

Panic-gogy rather than pedagogy

Relearn ‘pandemic pedagogies’

Resilience and endurance

Teaching my asset

Drawing on the three pantoum poems above, we individually reflected on what the poems meant to us. To guide our reflections, we drew on the prompt, What do our collective poems convey about our teacher selves during the transition to online teaching? We, thereafter, met via Zoom on 4 June 2021 to share our experiences. Below are narratives of our responses to the poems:

As teachers, we are ethically bound to carry out our practice in humanitarian and socially just ways. The poems highlight for me how my personal and/or professional selves often clash with the principles, values, and beliefs espoused by the academy in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. I consider teaching and researching an embodied activity where knowledge is constructed in dialogical ways and change happens in self and the other through human connections. The poems highlight for me my discomfort at having to make the transition from my tried and trusted pedagogies to a pedagogy unfamiliar to my students and myself. From knowing my game as a professional to relearning a new way of doing and becoming at lightning speed meant making shifts to my personal and professional selves. Throughout the change process, my being was constantly questioned. I am constantly being remade by external forces. I am forced to conform to unilaterally imposed norms. In the remaking, I am now seeing my students as images … as disembodied objects … objects from whom I am disconnected. The classroom is being reconfigured … a virtual space now consumes us as we welcome a disengaged pedagogy. [Inba]

The pandemic shifted both students and teachers to a place of uncertainty and unfamiliarity. During the teaching-learning encounters, emotions, and panic connected both teacher and learner in a pedagogy of panic. Together we were caught up in a panic/frenzy to engage in online platforms—sweeping us from one loop to another, in a technical instrumentalist way. Rather than allowing us to think about how teaching can be an asset when emotions and feelings are embodied in the teaching-learning encounters. Driven by a passion to move out of this abyss, and to seek out like-minded others and spaces, we engage co-flexively to recharge our teacher selves as a catalyst for relearning new pedagogies that can empower us and contribute to the well-being of our students [Daisy]

We were suddenly faced with the harsh reality and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic which disrupted our personal and professional selves. Even though we are accomplished and experienced teachers, we found ourselves in unfamiliar terrain. This forced us to reconsider our teacher selves and our teaching. With immense shifts in how we ‘think’ and ‘do’ teaching, we had to rapidly adjust and reframe not only who we were as teachers but also how we taught. This involved learning new digital technologies and negotiating heightened emotions. The shift to online teaching highlighted that teaching is indeed an emotional practice. While the rapid shifts in our teacher selves and teaching created a sense of frustration and being powerless, our resilience and passion for teaching shine through our poems. The COVID-19 pandemic fragmented both the reality of teaching as we knew it and our personal and professional selves. However, we were able to reframe our teacher selves, recharge and renew our passion for teaching. This embodies a decisive step towards self and teaching renewal. [Jacqui]

Our reflections on what the poems say about our shifting teacher selves became a source for rich dialogues among us when we met on 11 June 2021 via Zoom. We found dialoguing with each other very useful in excavating our values, beliefs, and assumptions about poetic inquiry and its potential to make visible our pedagogical practices during the pandemic (MacInnis & Portelli, 2002). It is envisaged that this account will add to existing methodological knowledge about collaborative object-inspired poetic inquiry as well as arts-based inquiry.

Drawing on our reflective responses to our pantoum poems, Inba used poetry as an analytical tool (Langer & Furman, 2004) to craft a concise Japanese five-line Tanka poem (Furman & Dill, 2015). Tanka poems are generally used to express human emotion and personal voice (Breckenridge, 2016). This paper highlights the methodological insight of poetry to not only generate rich data but also its possibility for analysis.

Human Connections

Teacher (dis)comfort (5)

Our resilience shines (7)

Human connections (5)

Together, a catalyst (7)

Recharge our teacher selves (7)

Discussion

During the Zoom session on 22 June 2021, we reflected on the Tanka poem and what we could learn from our co-creative online engagement with arts-based educational narratives, to assist us in negotiating the discomfort of online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. We drew on John-Steiner’s (2000) notion that collaborative work offers opportunities for individuals to take risks to recharge their everyday engagements and through methods and approaches that enable an engaged connectedness to what we are and do as teacher educators. Drawing on Hooks (2003), we embraced our struggles and engaged collaboratively in arts-based curiosity (Foucault, 1988; 1997). We read and re-read through our reflections on the object narratives, poetic inquiry, and transcripts of our discussions during Zoom sessions to highlight key issues. Three key issues emerged from our scholarly conversations which draw attention to the insight that our co-creative online engagement offered us to traverse the emotional education terrain and negotiate the discomfort of online teaching.

Co-Creative, Online Engagement Enables Sharing of Emotional Experiences: Going Through Similar Emotions

The COVID-19 pandemic presented an uncertain terrain during which we as teacher educators had to negotiate the changing teaching context as well as our emotions during the shift in our teaching practice. According to Weber and Mitchell (2004), co-creative arts-based research methods allow individuals to study and interpret their personal and emotional experiences. Foucault (1997) suggests that collaborating with others and drawing on their help represents ethical practice and care of the self. Hargreaves (2001) contends that teaching is an emotional practice, while Zembylas (2005) argues that by collaboratively engaging in self-reflection about their emotions, teachers can resist and transform their teaching environment. Similarly, Naidoo and Rule (2016) draw attention to the close link between teaching and emotions and suggest that when teachers collaborate they share positive and negative emotional experiences. We found that collaborative object-inspired poetic inquiry offered us opportunities for self-reflection, sharing our emotional experiences of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, and understanding our feelings (Wyatt, 2016).

During one of our dialogues, Jacqui shared that while we were isolated at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and did not communicate with our colleagues about the trauma and teaching dilemmas we faced, writing poems [from our object narratives] evoked certain [latent]emotions and allowed us to share our personal and professional experiences. In her object narrative, Jacqui further reflected on the difficult times as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and wrote: I felt powerless and drained of inspiration and energy, I had to draw on the energy of my colleagues and family, who served as my power bank. Jacqui’s reflection on her pantoum poem draws attention to the complex emotions she experienced teaching in the context of COVID-19 as highlighted in the following excerpt: While the rapid shifts in our teacher selves and teaching created a sense of frustration and being powerless, our resilience and passion for teaching shine through our poems. Jacqui sums up: The shift to online teaching highlighted that teaching is indeed an emotional practice and that we had to recharge and renew our passion for teaching.

Daisy also pointed out that our collaborative conversations about the poems allowed us to understand and emotionally connect with each other’s experiences by making us aware in an emotive and expressive way about what my colleagues were going through and empathise with colleagues as I was going through similar emotions.

Likewise, when Daisy reflected on her ‘passionate pedagogy’ and the teaching-learning process during the lockdown as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, she described the fear, anxiety and pain:

I contemplated lockdown and what it may mean for me and my passionate pedagogy… How can we work with our fears, anxieties, and pain in our passion to rethink ourselves and make better choices for what and how we want to be…

This suggests that teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic was emotionally demanding (Sammons et al., 2007) and it is important for teachers to be resilient and address educational challenges. Daisy further highlighted the emotional experiences she shared with her learners:

During the teaching-learning encounters, emotions, and panic connected both teacher and learner in a pedagogy of panic. Together we were caught up in a panic/frenzy to engage in online platforms.

In her pantoum poem Daisy mentioned the following emotional experiences:

Passion to rethink ourselves outside the lecture room Patterns changing bitter-sweet sensations

Through collaborative object inquiry, we shared our fear and anxiety about teaching during stressful, changing times and found that we shared similar emotional experiences. According to Daisy, we were driven by a passion to move out of this abyss and to seek out like-minded others and spaces. This highlights agency and being able to reflect on actions.

In his object narrative, Inba described the fear induced by the COVID-19 pandemic and how teaching during this time drained him emotionally:

The fears of the pandemic, coupled with being pressured into learning online modes of teaching within a short space of time was emotionally draining.

Inba further explained how collaborative object-inspired poetic inquiry allowed us to share our feelings and emotional experiences about the isolation caused by the COVID-19 lockdown and how this affected teaching during this time. He aptly sums up:

… we were left completely isolated and the university was communicating to you on a one on one … you didn’t have any chance to dialogue with anyone around you about what was happening … it’s only after some time we knew what each one was feeling. We could then identify with the feelings of others because we felt the same way.

The object narratives, pantoums, and reflections revealed the complex emotions we experienced as we shifted our teaching in the time of COVID. This resonates with (Hargreaves’, 2001, p. 1061) notion of emotional geographies of teaching in the context of educational reforms as patterns of “closeness and or distance of human interactions or relationships that create or configure and colour the feelings and emotions about ourselves, our world and each other”. Likewise, (Zembylas, 2005, p. 468) suggests that teachers’ emotions could serve as zones of “resistance and self-transformation” which affords opportunities for self-reflection and addressing changes in the teaching-learning environment. Thus, sharing emotional experiences facilitated a deeper understanding of the emotional trauma we experienced and how we could navigate our teaching dilemmas and reframe our teaching. This resonates with Haviland and Kahlbaugh (as cited in Zembylas, 2007) who explain how emotions connect people’s judgments and thoughts by providing meaning to experiences. Jacqui opined that it heightened for us what an emotional practice teaching is more so with this rapid change in our teaching approaches and methods during the pandemic.

Co-Creative Online Engagement Enables Transforming Teacher Selves: Who is This Teacher Educator that we are Becoming?

The changing context of the pedagogic setting and the shift from traditional teaching practices to online teaching resulted in dilemmas about our teacher selves and our teaching. Jacqui mentioned this in one of our dialogues:

[The pandemic made us] question who we are and who is this teacher that I am becoming … we found ourselves, shifting our sense of self and how we conceptualized and talked about teaching and our teaching philosophy.

Our teacher selves and our practice of teaching are fundamental components of our professional identity (Beauchamp & Thomas, 2009). Collaborative, object-inspired, poetic inquiry served as a vehicle for us to reflect on our dilemmas in respect of our teacher selves and our teaching amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. Jacqui, in stanza one of her object-inspired pantoum poem, aptly pointed out the shift she had to make in order to learn new ways of being and becoming as a higher education teacher:

Recharge, revitalise and empower

All of a sudden, uncertainty

Immense shifts in teacher self and teaching

Embrace new digital technologies

In explaining the essence of her pantoum poem she clarified that it captures how the practice of teaching as she knew it and the shifts she had to make in her teacher self.

I had to unlearn the familiar teaching methods and embrace and learn new digital technologies. The stress and uncertainty … resulted in me feeling like I was on a rollercoaster of emotional pedagogy.

Likewise, Daisy’s object-inspired pantoum poem centered on the re-making and renewal of the teacher self and teaching. This was fittingly captured in stanza one of her poem.

Move, connect, seek out and energise

Students and I face another unfamiliar complex day

Passion to rethink ourselves outside the lecture room

“Who am I” “Who am I as a teacher”

In synthesizing what her poem communicates, Daisy explicated that “This poem crystallizes for me the complexities, contradictions and ambiguities of being a teacher in the time of the pandemic”.

Inba shared similar sentiments to that of Daisy and Jacqui. The third stanza of his pantoum poem underscores the shifts he had to make to learn new pedagogies.

Panic-gogy rather than pedagogy

Relearn ‘pandemic pedagogies’

Resilience and endurance

Teaching my asset

Inba’s reference to pandemic pedagogies draws on the work of Fataar and Badroodien (2020) to characterise the rapid move of educational institutions to online pedagogies. The pandemic pedagogies for Inba were more of a panic reaction to teaching and learning by higher education institutions. Rather than being an organised pedagogical transition, it was more “emergency remote teaching” (Gusso et al., 2021, p. 1).

Arundhati Roy (2020), challenges us to see the pandemic as an opportunity to break with the past and reimagine anew our world. She suggests that we see the pandemic as a portal for change and space to remake our ‘selves’. Borrowing from Roy (2020), our collaborative object-inspired poetic inquiry did just that. It helped us make visible the transformation in our teacher selves by calling to attention how our shift from a space of comfort to one of discomfort can lead to productive remaking and renewal of the teacher self. Sharma (2011) explains that productive discomfort is about embracing discomfort as a positive experience. It is about using discomfort as an opportunity to learn about the self and transform the self. As higher education practitioners we had no choice but to turn the discomfort of the pandemic into something positive. We had to rethink our teacher selves and our teaching. It meant making shifts in how we ‘think’ and ‘do’ teaching. We had to rapidly adjust and reframe not only who we are as teachers but also how we see our practice as teachers. Linked to the notion of productive discomfort, our collaborative object-inspired poetic inquiry also brought into focus our teacher agency. Rather, than see ourselves as victims of a pandemic, it illuminated the power of our professional capital to respond to a changed pedagogic context by driving our unlearning and relearning of pedagogies (Calvert, 2016; Hargreaves & Fullan, 2012).

Co-Creative Online Engagement Enables the Cultivation of Relational Scholarly Thinking

Overwhelmed and limited by the university’s invested neoliberal discourse and imposed online teaching platforms that seemingly denigrated embodied teaching ways, we chose to work from a material lens with our moral dilemmas and tensions arising from teaching to prescribed outcomes and institutional expectations (Pithouse-Morgan et al., 2022). We found our methodological grounding in arts-based educational research an inventive space for sharing our subjective experiences and voices fuelled by care and affection versus anxiety and panic. Our collaborative object-inspired poetic reflections assembled for us key ideas and thoughts in response to what are our thoughts and feelings as online users. By creatively crystallising our subjective experiences as voices and insights it animated our resistance for “Us to Move, connect, seek out and energise.” As a reflective process in our scholarly conversation, we were able to look back on the self and our familiar experiences and writings in a new light (Eisner, 2002), to embrace new digital technologies, as we learn to navigate our teaching, as [our] asset.

Our collaborative online reflexive dialogues allowed us to highlight why we chose to resist dominant and hegemonic online practices in risk-taking ways and who benefits from these engaged ways of embodied online teaching. Jacqui highlighted that collaborative poetic inquiry offered a creative scholarly space: to write about our feelings and the choices that we made and how this would prepare us to respond to similar challenges and changing contexts in the future. She adds that it offered creative space to express our emotions...to think and write in creative, innovative ways, and allowed us to ‘think’ and ‘do’ teaching differently.

Daisy also pointed out that the collaborative object-inspired poetic inquiry highlighted:

how the help of others is necessary in going forward in planning for the future, and how we then learn not to react, but to respond to situations that we are going to encounter online as creative curious thinking individuals.

Jacqui and Daisy highlighted that creative collaborative spaces of resistance were opened up through art-based educational research adopted to interrupt the comfort of the instrumentalist online teaching approaches. However, Inba emphasised how our move out of our moral dilemma as isolated academics and the choice to collaborate with care and affection, evoked multiple ways of thinking about a particular phenomenon, word or phrase, leading to multiple interpretations.

This material practice-based understanding of our scholarly online work is not only ethical but also highlights a “political and social endeavour” (Allan, 2013, p. 29). The diffractive readings we each provided in the thematic ensembles discussed offer the reader insight into the methodological process we turned to as thinking, capable individuals to intervene in the dominant narratives of university online teaching platforms. We moved beyond and located virtual platforms like Zoom as a material, tangible and relational space “that affect and dialogues with each of us, and all of us” (Guyotte et al., 2018, p. 125) to enliven, embody and entangle through and with us as we zoom in and out of our work as academics. Provoked by our desire to make our voices heard, we used arts-based educational research as a possibility for cultivating ethical enfleshments of co-creative, co-flexive online learning as relational. We fostered the isolated academic existence “to achieve new kinds of existence” (Allan, 2013, p. 27).

Braiding Our Scholarly Online Learning Experiences

Poetic inquiry and critically reflecting on our object narratives offered methodological insight and creative spaces for dialogue about our online learning experiences in the context of educational change. Critical scholarly conversations allowed us to not only reflect on and transform our teacher selves and reframe our thinking about what it means to be a ‘teacher educator’, but also to revise our teaching practices and embrace the shifting teaching and learning context.

A key learning from this study is that despite experiencing emotions of frustration and powerlessness due to rapid shifts in our teacher selves and online teaching, our resilience and passion as well as arts-based educational research enabled us to transform our teaching. Given the complex, ambiguous and uncertain context within which many teacher educators work internationally, our study may resonate with them in terms of how they may negotiate their teacher selves through the unsettling moments they may experience in the academy. By drawing on co-creative arts-based methods (such as those we have drawn on), they may be able to productively think through the dilemmas in their pedagogy.