Abstract:

The coronavirus pandemic (COVID-19) shifted the paradigm of higher education in Finland and throughout the whole world. This paper is a phenomenological study that explores students’ and teachers’ embodied experiences of learning and teaching during COVID-19 lockdowns in the lived space. The point of departure lies in the question: “What happened to us?”. The focus of this study is on learning as an embodied and collaborative experience, where meaning-making takes place in a creative and interactive processes. The corporeality of classroom learning is manifested in gestures, facial expressions, and embodied encounters in space. However, when learning is confined into the two-dimensional sphere of a computer screen, the corporeal and sensuous aspect of communication is impaired. Research has also suggested that working online feels physically exhausting since the minds are together whereas the bodies are disconnected, making the interpretation of non-verbal clues more difficult. The benefit of comprehending our experinces will offer an insight into educational design during crisis.

Finnish universities shifted into online teaching, or what could also be described as emergency remote teaching in mid-March 2020, with some students never to return to the university campus. Students who started their studies in autumn 2020 and in 2021 alternated between online, hybrid and classroom teaching in accordance with rapidly changing government regulations. What was the outcome of learning becoming increasingly disembodied in a virtual learning environment where cameras were often turned off?

Qualitative data collection was conducted on students’ and teachers’ focus group as well as by means of individual interviews at the level of university of applied sciences. Apart from being observers, the authors are also positioned in the study as teachers who lived through COVID-19 online teaching and thus carry a subjective memory of disembodiment and existential loneliness in front of a muted screen.

Finally, on a cognitive level, online teaching was efficiently organized in Finnish tertiary level education. Yet, the pandemic has left embodied memories that need to be addressed for understanding the collective experience and emotions surfacing from online learning during a global crisis.

Keywords:

Embodiment, education in crisis, COVID-19, well-being, lived-space, students, teachers, university.