Human-Technology Relations in the Classroom: Postphenomenology-Inspired Field Notes From a COVID-Impacted Humanities Classroom in the Global South

Abstract

Integrative humanities aim to create cultural structures to negotiate with unforeseen events. Classroom experience during the pandemic-post-pandemic periods is one such crisis-ridden, generation-defining event. This paper — a crossover between a research article and field-notes, seeks to apprehend and articulate the nebulous experience of classroom instruction immediately after the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to make sense of the researcher’s dual-mode classroom, focusing on human-technology relations, informed by the postphenomenology framework. Technology integration in classroom, it is assumed, forms an effective heuristic to understand the whole spectrum of cognitive-affective responses in a classroom. The narrow focus of the field notes, a COVID-impacted classroom in a specific geographical location and socio-cultural context, with a learner-group of a particular demographic profile, where a certain kind/degree of technology-integration obtained, could help unpack the classroom dynamics across teaching-learning contexts. This hypothesis is based on two crucial factors: the academic “new normal” ushered in by the pandemic has made visible the often taken-for-granted procedures in the “normal” classroom, and secondly, specific classroom anecdotes, and theory-informed/theory-informing reflections on them, are perhaps more helpful in formulating valid generalizations, and lead to the production of socially usable knowledge, than abstract theorizing.



Author Information
Samson Thomas, The English and Foreign Languages University, India

Paper Information
Conference: IICAH2025
Stream: Teaching and Learning

This paper is part of the IICAH2025 Conference Proceedings (View)
Full Paper
View / Download the full paper in a new tab/window

Virtual Presentation


Comments & Feedback

Place a comment using your LinkedIn profile

Comments

Share on activity feed

Powered by WP LinkPress

Share this Research

Posted by James Alexander Gordon