Back to Bodies 3: Pandemic Teaching and Embodied Practice

What pedagogical challenges has the pandemic posed to us? How are we embodied in our new teaching practices?

As academic communities approach a two-year anniversary of pandemic teaching, this seminar, convened by Mikhail Vodopyanov (Russian Department, SoML), invites us to reflect on how the pandemic transformed our teaching methods, and how we are embodied in new pedagogical processes shaped by this pandemic experience.

What happens when a student's “disciplined” and “socialized” body is visually replaced by a black square on a computer screen, and how does it affect teaching and learning? Scholar of Russian culture and media Dr Vera Zvereva (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) will address this question and speak about some of the pedagogical practices of the Department of Languages and Communications, tested in two years of online teaching.

Cultural studies scholar Dr Viktoria Merzliakova (RSUH, RANEPA, Russia) will join us online from Moscow to share her experiences of pandemic teaching in Russia in her talk “‘Black Square' of Online Teaching: Network Connection as an Embodied Communicative Experience”.

A Q&A session and discussion will follow. This event will be hosted in the Arts Building, Seminar Room 9. It will be held dual-delivery, and can be joined on Microsoft Teams.