Postgraduate pedagogy in pandemic times: Online forums as facilitators of access to dialogic interaction and scholarly voices

Abstract

In 2020, when the switch to remote teaching and learning required redesigning asynchronous on-line versions of face-to-face courses, we were concerned about whether access to engaged and dialogic learning could be facilitated in this new space. In attempting to address this concern we asked students in a B Ed Honours course to post, in an online forum, their reflective responses to weekly readings and to each other’s posts. This discussion forum became the engine of the course. With their permission, the posts of students in the 2021 cohort, together with their summative reflective reading response assignment, were analysed in order to understand different kinds of dialogic interactions and their affordances for reducing the potential alienation of asynchronous learning. One of the key findings that emerged from this analysis is the role of dialogic interaction in facilitating the development of personal, professional and scholarly voices which contributed to epistemic access. Our analysis was informed by the theoretical work of Bakhtin on the dialogic and by theoretical and empirical work of scholars in the field of critical pedagogies. We use examples from the writing of a ‘stronger’ and a ‘weaker’ student to illustrate how students negotiated roles and positions for themselves by appropriating and using the textual resources available on the forum. We argue for the value of sustained practice in ‘writing about reading’, of reading each other’s writing and of ‘writing back’ to one another on-line, for the gradual acquisition of a range of confident voices and for enhanced understanding of module content.

The influence of online education on pre-service teachers’ academic experiences at a higher education institution in the United Arab Emirates

“…Effective teaching of pre-service teachers also requires the ability to create engaging and interactive learning experiences. Engagement entails enthusiastic participation and immediacy of communication, using applications and platforms such as online forums to facilitate dialog and interaction (Mendelowitz et al, 2022) and reduce anxiety, essential to enhance postgraduate students' learning experience (Kumar and Verma, 2021).…”

Pivots Provocateurs and Wallflowers Postgraduate Students Diverse Roles in Generating Dialogic Online Forum Discussions

“…We conceptualise such a pedagogy as having four key elements: engagement with audience, reflexivity, multivoicedness and engagement with texts and cultural resources (Mendelowitz et al 2022). Reflexivity entails dialogues with the self and we are particularly interested in how this 'inner conversation' (Bradbury 2020: 23) is reshaped by dialogue with others and with textual/ cultural resources.…”

“…We began by analysing the 2021 B.Ed. Honours cohort's online discussion forums in the Language and Literacy, Theories and Practices course, in terms of the role of dialogic interaction in developing personal, professional and scholarly voices which can contribute to increased epistemic access (Mendelowitz et al 2022). In this chapter, we consider how the agency evident in the 2020 and 2021 students' discussion forum posts manifested in the various roles they played in responding to course readings and in interacting with peers and lecturers.…”

Humanising Online Pedagogy through Asynchronous Discussion Forums

“…It provides a space for learning, engagement, and interaction to occur without meeting face-to-face, even if members are logged on at different times (Kaur, 2011).On an online forum such as those we made use of in our LMS, members of the course site can post and respond to one another by posting messages, images and voice notes, and use the "like" function to show agreement with a post. A growing body of research has shown that online forums have the potential to enhance learning outcomes (Abawajy & Kim, 2011;Kadagidze, 2014;Gleason, 2020;Tomic et al, 2020;Mendelowitz et al, 2022). Abawajy and Kim (2011, p. 696) also add that "discussion forums offer a unique opportunity where some of the most important learning such as engagement in learning task, deeper levels of understanding, increased metacognition, increased motivation and divergent thinking can happen."…”

“…Humanising pedagogy has been explored by many scholars (for example, Fataar, 2016;Zinn et al, 2016;Kajee, 2021;Mendelowitz et al, 2022), and common themes emerge in literature on humanising pedagogy, including a focus on pedagogical strategies that can facilitate "learning communit[ies], engagement, collaboration, belonging, connection, interactive social learning, social presence, identity building, [and] personalized learning" (Parker et al, 2021, p. 120). In South Africa, humanising pedagogy is viewed as a way to acknowledge and challenge the legacy of oppressive systems like apartheid and the impact of inequality on education.…”