Reconciling romanticization and vilification: constituting post-pandemic communication pedagogy

Abstract

Whether online teaching is a challenge or an opportunity is the wrong question for us to ask and answer. Online teaching in myriad forms has been essential to teaching and learning--though to different degrees depending on the discipline, institution, student, and educator--for decades and will remain so. Though the authors of this article have some concerns about what it means to maximize variables and to engage in course design in an opportunistic way, they agree not only that communication scholars are well poised to lead other disciplines in defining the post-pandemic higher education landscape, but also that they have a responsibility to do so. However, to succeed, this endeavor must be fundamentally intersectional--of identities, methodologies, and paradigms--and communication scholars must re-engage their most fundamental assumptions about communication itself and the purpose of their work as teacher-scholars.