Cartographic horizons of corporeality (or its absence) in the virtual French class

Abstract

The emergency virtual educational process has marked the year 2020 and has challenged teaching practices, proposing new modes of subjectivation, face-to-face interaction and communication, and therefore new ways of learning and teaching. As teachers of French as a Foreign Language at the university level, we intend to build knowledge through our classroom experience, thinking of man as a territory, analyzing the actions, changes, adaptations and interactions that took place during this period of the pandemic and continue, not without consequences for the development of the teaching and learning processes.

As new territories emerge, the rational impulse emerges that insists on mapping them through different traits, to guide us and direct us to the firm ground or not… The lack of spontaneity, the blurring of corporeality, the restrictions on exchanges and the generation of peer bonds are some of the difficulties we encountered during the emergency remote teaching. That is why we focus our reflection on the body as the materiality of face-to-face interaction, analyzing various aspects that are part of the hidden curriculum in the in-person class and the synchronous virtual meeting. This analysis leads us to formulate a series of questions that generate marks and enable new geographies, which will probably have their answer over time and in the evolution of digital education.