Creating authentic connectedness online through a shared experience of ‘not-knowing’

ABSTRACT

This article describes the experience of two educators in a master program in Pedagogy in the Netherlands. Their experience is of an online gathering with students and educators that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. Students and educators were not allowed to meet face-to-face, thus resorted to online education. What happened at that online gathering was that the educators observed how the group connected to each other in a way that was reminiscent of the ‘normal’ face-to-face gatherings before the pandemic, but had been absent since the group was forced to meet online. The article starts with individual, subjective descriptions of this experience by the two educators. Subsequently, these so-called thick descriptions are interpreted and analysed. The purpose of zooming in on this particular experience is to gain insight into what pedagogical forms contributed to the enabling of this perceived authentic connectedness in the digital sphere.

KEYWORDS:

• Not-knowing
• online
• pedagogical forms
• thick descriptions
• aphanipoiesis
• wonder

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. We follow Ponterotto here, who distilled the following working definition based on the original description of Ryle (1971) and further elaborations: ‘Thick description accurately describes observed social actions and assigns purpose and intentionality to these actions, by way of the researcher’s understanding and clear description of the context under which the social actions took place. Thick description captures the thoughts and feelings of participants as well as the often-complex web of relationships among them. Thick description leads to thick interpretation, which in turns leads to thick meaning of the research findings for the researchers and participants themselves, and for the report’s intended readership. Thick meaning of findings leads readers to a sense of verisimilitude, wherein they can cognitively and emotively “place” themselves within the research context’ (Ponterotto 2006, 543).

2. N.B.: obviously, there is more to say about the form and curriculum of our educational program, but for the purpose of this paper, this observation suffices.

3. Although Nora Bateson herself would never claim expertise over this concept and does just the opposite, she says she doesn’t know how it works, just that it’s there doing its work out of reach.