by Cathy Faulkner and Fiona Hartley
A lack of student engagement as a result of less interaction in online lessons during the Covid pandemic is documented (Aljahromi, 2020). Less has been written about the continuing lack of oral participation upon return to the physical classroom, although anecdotally this legacy would seem to be very real. Perhaps enforced periods of isolation have affected young adults’ ability to collaborate in the co-construction of knowledge with their peers. Or perhaps we are now witnessing the inevitable effects of increased technology use, and the pandemic has simply brought a pre-existing issue more sharply into focus. Either way, many teachers returned to the face-to-face classroom expecting the lively discussion of former years to be immediately reignited, only to be met with an uncanny silence as heads remained hidden behind screens, shared documents were added to, and a laptop was passed back and forth occasionally.
Seeking to understand this silence in the post-pandemic classroom, we gathered the views and experiences of our International Foundation Programme (IFP) students by means of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Many felt they understood the expectations and need for group work, but this didn’t always translate into practice. As one student said, ‘you’re meant to have discussions, but nobody really does discussions, I guess’. A number of themes were identified as playing a part in this. Communicating with others from different cultural and language backgrounds was regarded as a significant challenge, and although its value was often understood and students could confidently tell us that ‘staying with friends from your country doesn’t benefit you’, avoidance of such integration was also commonly reported. Students’ previous educational backgrounds and maturity also played a part: ‘teachers are experts and students don’t have expertise’ was a view we frequently encountered, particularly among younger students. Those who held such a belief were likely to find it difficult to adapt to a social constructivist approach to learning, especially when they did not see the purpose of a task. Finally, the wide variety of technologies available to students were identified as potentially distracting for students, as well as something to hide behind.
In an attempt to rekindle lively discussion in the IFP classroom, we intend to address each of these themes in the materials we develop and use in the next phase of our research project.
References
Aljahromi, D., 2020, December. Towards the Provision of Effective Interaction in Post Covid-19 E-Learning Contexts: Enhancing E-interactions on the LMS‘s Discussion Boards. In 2020 Sixth International Conference on e-Learning (econf) (pp. 98-103). IEEE.
This is a really interesting are to research. All the issues raised by students above were also true of the pre-pandemic IFP classroom, though, when oral interaction took place a lot more and there was a buzz of pair and group work in the F2F classrooms (after trust was built) – so there must be some other factor to be uncovered!
Such useful research, I’m looking forward to hearing more about what you find out! As Maxine mentiones above, I also remember these attitudes being present among face to face students in the pre-pandemic classroom, and I imagine Covid has exacerbated them, as you suggest in your post.