Bríd Connolly, a Community Story from Ireland
I am an adult educator working with mature learners at level 8, 9, and 10. My interests are in critical pedagogy and groupwork, gender, reflexivity, and social analysis. In fact, the whole scope of adult and community education. I am an EPALE ambassador and I have interacted with the platform for some time. I find it useful to float ideas that may be of interest to other EPALEANS and to develop my own ideas.
The focus of this blog is my reflection on my experience of working with adult learners in the collective response to COVID 19.
I found it very difficult to shift from face-to-face pedagogy to online, but I was determined to keep it critical even within the limits of the virtual learning environment. The major change for me was to provide a lot of content through my voice, which is completely alien for me, as I prefer to use groupwork, discussion and critical questions in my practice. Further, the technology was new to me. We used Teams, the facility provided by Microsoft and supported by my employer, Maynooth University. With trepidation, I started to learn to use Teams, particularly through my mistakes but also, relying on the students who had much more digital literacy than I had. They were also to show me how to develop content and to share slides, tolerating my fumbles and stumbles with humour and tolerance. Thank you all!
However, the most important learning for me is how to convey the personal alongside the pedagogical.
It is vital to connect, respect and dialogue with the learners, to facilitate group discussion and to provide the opportunity to reflect and question. Online learning must develop critical pedagogy, and not default to disembodied lectures. And it must endeavour to influence this critical practice in all other spheres of education. This is a real opportunity to learn and develop, to reach out to people who cannot participate face-to-face, and to usher in a new era in education in these uncertain times. First things first, though. Online learning necessarily entails internet access. This means that the information highway can be transformed from an unmoderated compendium into a ‘Really Useful’ Education Pathway!!
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