Teaching and learning in virtuality: an autoethonographic story about the body in the new educational settings

Abstract

Teachers and students build their own ways of doing and seeing as they stay at the university. In this sense, we inhabit these practices, which are characterized by the times and spaces populated by singular discourses, objects, ghosts, looks, illusions and materialities. Our bodies make up this materiality. His presence is essential, for we exist because we are bodies. It is also in them, that our experiences leave traces.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, during last year, we have been locked down. Our university had to turn its face-to-face activities into virtual ones. Thus, unthinkable scenes turned up. Our practices have been changed, as well as the place of our bodies in them. We have reinvented ourselves, as uncertainty and unpredictability were extreme. We have produced new senses about teaching and learning. Thus, we have experienced a strangeness of the ways we have to do it before, when we met face to face.

In this writing, I present, from a research approach and a specific methodology such as autoethnography, an autoethnographic story about the body's place in the new virtual scenes of teaching and learning in college.

The objectives of this work are to understand the body´s place in the virtual educational scene and to invite the reader to reflect upon his own corporeality experience when teaching and learning at university in general and in the virtual scenes in particular.