Open AccessFrom Despair to Hope: A Narrative Journey to Becoming Amateur Intellectuals During COVID-19
Author(s) -
Julianne Gerbrandt,
Stefania Strati
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of digital life and learning
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2564-3185
DOI - 10.51357/jdll.v1i1.115
Subject(s) - reflexivity , autoethnography , narrative , complicity , identity (music) , feeling , sociology , amateur , storytelling , psychology , aesthetics , social psychology , gender studies , political science , social science , law , literature , art , philosophy
In this narrative paper, we explore our coming-of-age as amateur intellectuals through our collaborative engagement with reflexivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. Situating our reflective acts within technology and our educational contexts we address and analyze feelings of persistent tug of war between despair and hope. Through collaborative autoethnography, we challenged our perceptions and investigated our views on educator identity as “teachers†to challenge perceptions of educator roles and responsibilities. We discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic response narrowed the role of the teacher, ultimately diminishing and destabilizing teacher identity while limiting their sense of agency. We draw on our collective experiences during the pandemic to draw a thread between the pandemic response’s effect on teaching and teacher identity, a conflicting awareness of both complicity and resistance, and our battles with the despair of necessity. By engaging in collaborative doubt and reflexivity, we discovered that we were consistently instilled with an astonishing sense of hope within our community.