Abstract:

This narrative inquiry is focused on how 21 preservice and practicing teachers along with their instructor navigated the parameters of two online courses taught during fall and spring semesters of 2020-2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic. It documents the activities and decisions of the instructor, who was the researcher in this study and also a full-professor with tenure participating in a campus-wide cohort in the Special Collections Libraries' 2020 Faculty Fellows program. Specifically, the instructor initiated archival pedagogy for the first time in fall semester 2020 in a course titled New and Digital Literacies. The same course was revised for spring semester 2021 and taught at the height of the Pandemic under adverse conditions, which included racial unrest and numerous cases of COVID-19 that created absences, lockdown policies, and personal traumas among her students. As a result of policies developed by higher education administrators at her university, the instructor was required to carry on business as usual. She was also required to treat information shared with her by students as confidential material. In this fairly chaotic context (and knowing full well her responsibilities as a faculty fellow in the 2020 Special Collections Libraries program), the instructor adapted the course curriculum in New and Digital Literacies so that it spoke to her students' development of diverse digital identities, which culminated in a final podcasting project. Data sources included students' individually developed podcasts that they published on the Anchor fm app under an agreement with Spotify. In addition to the podcasts, the instructor's narrative inquiry relied on the following secondary data sources: digitally stored videos, archival documents from the Special Collections Libraries, class emails stored on e-Learning Commons, instructor-designed rubrics, asynchronous discussion boards, synchronous discussions (recorded on Zoom), and individually selected archival objects that served as centerpieces of individually created podcasts. Findings pointed to the merit of providing agentic-learning opportunities for exploring one’s digital identity, especially in the context of learning to create podcasts. A sense of self-empowerment and creative ownership arose among students in both semesters' courses. Another finding across semesters was the students’ discovery that podcasting on topics they had previously identified as being personally and professionally meaningful were acknowledged as such by the instructor, the graduate teaching assistant, and their peers in the class. An underlying tension for the instructor was how to honor students' wishes to share their traumas with peers in small-group activities (all online and at times video recorded on Zoom for the benefit of their classmates who had to miss the Zoom meetings because of illness diagnosed as COVID-19) while simultaneously trying to meet administrative policies designed to protect students' privacy and well-being. Implications are discussed for research, practice, and ever-moving policies in Pandemic times.

Keywords:

Digital Technologies, Pandemic Lockdown, Literacy Instruction, Narrative Inquiry.