Abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to enormous consequences for teaching and learning in higher education. With the introduction of emergency remote teaching (ERT) in 2020, teachers and students in the fields of social work, education and pedagogy, health and nursing faced particular challenges in transferring traditional learning scenarios into digital settings. The applied social sciences traditionally rely on highly interactive and reflexive teaching methods that train their students’ communicative, reflective, and interactive skills (Weinert 2001). These methods are used quite naturally in face-to-face classrooms but are not particularly easy to incorporate online. Although – at first sight – most lectures and seminars could be transferred to the digital space easily, teachers as well as students had often been dissatisfied with teaching and learning without physical presence. In spring 2021, for example, a group of social work students at the University of Applied Sciences for Social Work, Education and Nursing Dresden initiated a protest action and explicitly spoke out against the continuation of remote teaching. After two years of distance learning ERT, transferring community building into digital space is often considered as dissatisfying and difficult to implement. Therefore, an appropriate development of reflexive professionalism by creating adequate transfer concepts in digital learning and teaching contexts seems necessary. The BediRa-Project (Building Reflexive Professionalism and Relationships in Online Education), located at the University of Applied Sciences for Social Work, Education and Nursing Dresden, introduces students as well as teachers to create new forms of relationships in online teaching and learning. Our central approach: new ways of teaching and learning should be created within a co-constructivist atmosphere (Chi 1996). Based on our paper (Weimann-Sandig, Seymer & Kleppsch 2022), we will introduce the central challenges of remote teaching in the fields of social work, education and nursing by presenting empirical material from qualitative and quantitative student evaluations and by giving two examples: our student think-tank called “ehs student change makers” as well as our “BediRa-Lab”. Following the ‘Students as Partners’ approach (Healey et al 2014; Cook-Sather & Abbot 2016), students – as well as teachers – are introducing new digital educational tools to each other. Furthermore, we are discussing the challenges and surplus values on co-constructivism in higher education, not only for online teaching, but also with regard to the problems students and teachers, are facing in times of the “new normal”: dealing with social phobias, anxiety disorders and the deep-seated fear of even more changes. Here we provide the example of a new lecture design called “Aristotelian Evening Walks”.

Keywords:

Digital learning and teaching, co-constructivism in higher education, students as partners.