Workshop Overview

This session is a half-day, afternoon undergraduate-teaching-focused workshop.

Teaching is central to many of our academic lives, whether we are graduate teaching assistants or junior or senior faculty members; tenure-track, tenured, or contingent; or experienced educators or instructors relatively new to teaching. In the classroom – on campus or virtual – our students’ understandings of social media and internet use don’t always align with broader press or research narratives. Moreover, and in response to this year’s conference topic, new media technologies have been central to and within ruptures in undergraduate teaching environments and approaches. At no time in recent history was this disruption more evident than when classes moved online at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic: a move that exposed ruptures between and among students in terms of, for instance, access to broadband technology that wasn’t evident in the classroom.

This workshop brings educators together to discuss the difficulties and joys of teaching in, on, and around the internet. What do we learn from our students about the internet, how are we using the internet to teach, and what’s the best way of bringing AoIR research into our classrooms? How do we use the internet in teaching when our students don’t have broadband access, aren’t digitally-savvy, and as well as when our institutions do not offer robust technical infrastructures or support? For what kinds of creative, information, or other industries are our students really prepared?

This workshop allows organizers and participants with a range of teaching experiences that span types of institutions, student populations, and institutional support roles to discuss issues like teaching loads, expectations of service to students and administration, and international institutional terminologies. For that reason, the workshop is discussion-based, with a different broad topic covered each hour.

Logistics

A minimum of eight participants and a maximum of 25 is ideal for making the workshop both productive for participants and manageable for organizers. Prior to the workshop, participants fill out a questionnaire so that we have a sense of the teaching contexts and expectations of participants. We use the shared Google document as a resource that participants can refer to after the event, and all registered participants can share their thoughts on the workshop’s a shared Google doc.

We tailor the workshop to focus on experiences and resources brought forth in responses to the questionnaire and expand on them through discussion. The first hour focuses on introductions, and on outlining the key concerns, questions, and issues resulting from questionnaire responses. The second hour focuses on sharing concerns and successes in teaching, and strategies, assignments or techniques employed that center around digital media and internet research in a pedagogical setting. During the third hour, participants will perhaps work in smaller groups, the topics of which are determined by workshop participants. Each participant would then join the group that best addresses their needs and expectations. The fourth hour includes the summation of the group work and of all the afternoon’s discussion, and also plans for documenting and sharing strategies and materials that were mentioned during the workshop.

The organizers intend to adhere as closely to the structure described above as possible and to give participants substantive takeaways at the end of the workshop, while also being flexible so that the workshop best fits the participants’ needs. We hope in Rio de Janeiro to attract and benefit a range of people that represents the global reach of internet research and pedagogies.

This workshop adheres to AoIR’s Statement of Principles and Statement of Inclusivity (https://aoir.org/diversity-and-inclusivity), which is a commitment to academic freedom, equality of opportunity, and human dignity, and which supports at its conferences “A civil and collegial environment rooted in a belief of equal respect for all persons. Such an environment, among other things, should encourage active listening and awareness of inappropriate or offensive language.”