The virtual field trip: conditions of access/ibility and configurations of care in teaching ethnography (during Covid-19)

Online learning as an emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic provides a set of challenges that all educators had to navigate in their approach to teaching. This article details our experiences, as young educators, with developing a remote version of the anthropology field trip. The initial hard lockdown in South Africa determined the minimal conditions of emergency remote teaching (ERT). First, a necessary condition for the field trip was that teaching and learning had to take place asynchronously to account for the various contexts where students were situated. Second, we had to strike a balance between empathy towards students’ varying access to ERT and ensuring that the teaching objectives and standards remained appropriate for their level of study. Third, the role of mentorship in the process was a critical element of the virtual field trip and enabled us to engage affective learning strategies and facilitate epistemic access. Due to the shared navigation of ERT between students and educators, a reflexive and critical pedagogy strongly informed our later adaptations of the course. We conclude with reflections on the challenge of teaching/learning ethnography remotely and a brief statement on the value of critical and experimental pedagogies for remote situations.