Thinging teachers: gleaning nearness in dis/embodied eLearning through poetic inquiry

abstract

This piece aims to give glimpses of how we slide and dis/connect in embodied-virtual nodes and nets during Covid-19 lock-down, where lecturers reach from the virtual to be near students whom they normally care for in a contact university. Similar to how the concept of the global South helps us to look at the world in more encompassing richness, poetic inquiry contributes to insight by exposing diversity and difference and by grounding research in body and emotion − because traditional research might miss the grains within which the stories sing. I conducted performative interviews to engage through Zoom with three women lecturers from the Durban University of Technology, where I support staff in eLearning. For close to thirty years here, I have been ever-perplexed by how we are affected and how selves morph as we criss-cross the thin membrane between corporeal and virtual. Here, encounters are often out-the-box performances that ring with grit and great heart, as networks of tech and teacher perform feats to be near their students. Bearing in mind teachers in relation to technology as things, I explore nearness philosophically − Heidegger’s (1971) preoccupation with “when the thing things”, and then, how Irigaray (1999) extends this western philosophical concept into embodied, intuitive knowing. To understand and analyse this line of argument, I wrote poems rooted in my personal, visceral-virtual, but also natural world – thus implying that the divide between us and nature is fluid too: similar to there being no “bright red line” between us and our technological tools, as Jackson (2014, p.232) says in ‘Rethinking repair’. While rightfully many current debates concentrate on Fourth Industrial Revolution technologies such as implants, these poems invite you to spot and think about more subtle, ordinary, often overlooked, “artefacts and forms of knowledge associated with women”, to quote Judy Wajcman (2009, p.144).

keywords:

• poetic inquiry
• things
• eLearning
• nearness
• performative interview

Notes

1 uKhahlamba: Barrier of spears (isiZulu)

2 Quotes: KwaZulu-Natal potter Andrew Walford in A Potter’s Tale in Africa. The Life and Work of Andrew Walford by Neil Wright (2009) – the poem was generated from the contents of the book.

3 Noo-noo: A South African term of endearment (particularly to a child); a nickname; an insect.

4 Found poem: when a poet shapes another text (for example an interview transcript or an article) into a poem, using the original words only. Original text of found poem: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1re5A67wuwp7jDy6wrg7-L6T90GYrGMeK/view (accessed 11 November 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marí Peté

MARÍ PETÉ is an educational technologist at the Durban University of Technology, working among lecturers as practical problem solver as well as technology ethnographer – to gain insight into diverse, fluid and contradictory lived experiences. Part of this is achieved by tapping into the imagination, which she believes, is equal to reason. Marí edited the Agenda-endorsed book of Art for Humanity, Women Artists and Poets Advocate Children’s Rights. She won the Woordgilde competition with a poem for working mothers; and made the shortlist of the Sol Plaatje competition with the poem ‘Warwick Junction’, a praise poem for Durban’s working women. Her first (of five) collection begin, was nominated for the Ingrid Jonker prize. Email: [email protected]| maripetepoetry.com