"I Sing the Body Electric": Embodied Presence in the Community of Inquiry Framework

Abstract

Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, more K-12 teachers in the United States were teaching online than ever before, particularly in rural and economically distressed communities (US Department of Education, 2011), and since March 2020, nearly every teacher has become, at least for a little while, a virtual teacher. The purpose of this study was to better understand the embodied experiences of women “sojourner” teachers—that is, teachers who move among online, face-to-face, and hybrid teaching spaces (Howell, 2020). Working from a feminist poststructuralist perspective, I gathered qualitative data from four sojourner teachers in the Midwestern and Mid-Atlantic United States. These data revealed participants’ complex relationships with their bodies while teaching online and how their bodies fit into their perceptions of what it means to be a good virtual teacher. I argue that the current domains of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework (Garrison et al., 2000) are limited and would benefit from the explicit inclusion of embodiment to facilitate discussion about the interplay of physical and intellectual labor and, potentially, the real effects embodied identities have on teachers’ experiences in virtual classrooms.