Pandemic Team Teaching: Stories of Collaborative Performativity

Abstract

It began early on March 17, 2020: A postsecondary teaching team was preparing for an on-site workshop at a public gallery when the latter suddenly contacted us saying they would be unable to assist further with the course, Art and Design Education Lab. Pandemonium ensued. Research assistants ran to the gallery to photograph exhibits. The instructor emailed the class to change the meeting location. Some students were panicking, unsure if they should even be in class. A jumble of questions rang out: How will we complete our fieldwork? How will we finish the term? Despite the chaos, the team rallied: The librarian provided resource support, research assistants facilitated the workshops, the instructor and teaching assistant arranged for remote fieldwork with another gallery, then we all met in class at the end of the day just as the gallery announced its closure. Our affiliated university shut down soon after. Thus began our COVID-19 lockdown. Pause. Response: Our teaching team gathered remotely using Microsoft Teams. Provoked by the idea of creating generative and coparticipatory activities for online learning, we agreed to push ourselves as teacher–researchers in new directions. We knew intuitively that we would need to find new ways to connect. What consumed us was an irrepressible, manic uncertainty. To counteract this, we began to ask deeply reflective questions: Can we cultivate a capacity to follow curiosity and sit with anxiety as we build curriculum? How is this pandemic altering our imagination and thinking? How do we engage as agents of affective, ethical, and practical consequence? Canadian cultural theorist Natalie Loveless (2019) notes that spaces are being created for literacies that tell uncanny stories that can carry within them other ethics. These communications “matter as sites of friction and debate... require[ing] multimodality” (p. 56). Artist and educator dian marino (1997) valued a dynamic approach to learning, speaking to teaching as having “a twofold characteristic of creating safety while at the same time challenging students to move towards more critical, exploratory, or complex interpretations” (p. 47). As a teaching team, we activated such spaces using a participatory performative practice that values multiparticipant engagement and recognizes teaching, learning, and curricking (Courtney, 1992) as performative. Our work was further inspired by Charles Garoian (1999), who understood performativity as “critical pedagogy,” a praxis that critiques cultural codes, develops agency, and ultimately produces new cultural images and ideas based on students’ subjectivities (p. 57). Differences were acknowledged among our students and us, explored in art, and through storied dialogue. This story is a methodological tool to enable us to parse the curriculum, then reperform it with new discoveries and connections made during the 1st year of the pandemic.