Abstract

UAL uses Blackboard Collaborate, a platform that can be seen as transactional, sterile, inert and patriarchal in design and ownership. Digital and virtual tools and spaces can facilitate online community but just as easily alienate and disconnect with screen and VLEs as place of access, also as barriers. How could the hegemony of the space be othered? How to radically engage and belong via the online experience – for both students and staff? This paper is informed by my Action Research Project as part of my PG Cert and investigates the potentials of affective pedagogy in online spaces through post-human, feminist and queer lenses.

Session and activities

This is a proposed paper oral and visual presentation with provocations and questions to be offered for discussion. This is a proposed paper oral and visual presentation with provocations and questions to be offered for discussion. The resulting discourse will centre around the possibilities for staff and students to engage with affective pedagogy in and through varied digital tools and methods to build a virtual network of equity, agency and knowledge exchange that embraces the experimental, the playful and the unexpected for enhanced engagement and notions of belonging in the space. The attendees will take away alternate ideas for teaching and learning in the digital space, several tools for interventions plus concepts to provoke new/different ways of thinking about our VLEs. The presentation will contain the following sections from my research: The screen and the ambient gaze – many theorists equate looking, seeing, viewing with desire – a heated surveillance of sorts. If the medium is the message (McLuhan, 1964) then which gaze is the computer screen in Ellis’ (1982) spectrum of screens and looking? A post-human osmosis? A feedback loop of performativity? Is it a passiveness of the feminine trapped in the ‘active’ space of technology? I offer a space of online play and connection needed for community underpinned by feminist ethics of care and therefore affectivity in pedagogy. Online as other – “ I hate it”: the hierarchy of the physical experience of classrooms versus the digital/ VLE’s and what constitutes teaching and learning for students. This will include examples of my pilot study via Padlet with the MA DAD cohort. Belonging in cyborg classrooms – heterotopias and coalescent teaching and learning spaces. The social spaces of learning and how they translate into fun, vibrant and playful spaces of interactivity and co-creation through community building – examples of Miro and Teams interventions from my research will be presented. Bits and Pieces of Bodies across the UAL network – how digital bodies create and contextualise sensations and affects. Needs for an extended, interrelated network of digital touchpoints for comprehending the institution, the student experience and identity and belonging at UAL.