Abstract:

Teaching is often described in temporal phases: planning, interactions with students, assessment and reflection. Creative work, or teaching as design, is typically associated with the planning phase, encompassing the development of learning materials, tasks, and assessments. While much attention has been given to the design for learning, the creative work teachers do to structure the social relations that enable collective learning activity of students is underexplored. This constitutes a research problem because these social structures condition how students participate in learning activity, particularly when typical campus-based occasions for interaction are disrupted (e.g., COVID-19 pandemic).

This study examines teaching as the design of the social form of students’ learning activity. It focuses on the research question: how did university teachers reorganize pedagogical practice when campus co-presence of teachers and students was disrupted during the COVID-19 pandemic? During this period, courses were moved to online, blended, or hybrid formats with minimal planning and preparation.

Fifteen semi-structured interviews with university teachers were analyzed using Activity Theory to examine how pandemic-induced disruptions affected pedagogical practices and how educators reorganized these practices in response. The analysis showed that, besides designing artifacts such as recorded lectures, teachers actively organized and structured the social relations that allowed students to engage in collective learning activity. For example, teachers scheduled informal online meetings to introduce students to one another, prompted peer interactions during video conferences, and used collective assignments to encourage student cooperation and collaboration.

The findings indicate that teaching as design operates at interrelated levels, including artifacts for learning and, crucially, the social relations underpinning students’ activity. Under conditions of disruption, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the organization of social space became both a site of challenge and a domain for pedagogical intervention, highlighting the significance of teachers’ creative work. The findings further suggest that teachers rely on campus in supporting student connections, indicating that features of the learning environment—such as shared spaces that afford informal encounters and opportunities for spontaneous interaction—facilitate the establishment and maintenance of social relations that underpin collective learning activity. An implication for the design of learning management systems and environments is that the organization of social relations should be treated as an explicit design concern, alongside conventional course administration features.

Keywords:

Teaching as design, COVID-19, higher education.