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ABSTRACT
In this article we discuss our experiences of team teaching via ‘emergency remote teaching’ a hybrid literature/creative writing subject, ‘Life Writing’, during 2020, amid the Covid-19 pandemic. We explore how a focus on concepts and issues foundational to life writing as a discipline provided unique points of engagement at a challenging time for students. We discuss our experiences via case studies ranging from object life writing to YouTube and biography. The article explains our methods and how we approached with extra sensitivity the fact of challenging conditions affecting student lives and learning during this time. We found that our students showed strong evidence of deep engagement with the subject and its learning activities and assessments. Through participation, the students showed high-level comprehension and produced relevant and authentic work. The context resulted in learning and teaching that was necessarily personal and allowed students to show their knowledge of life narrative through an engagement with theory and personal practice.
Acknowledgements
This research was completed in accordance with the ethics protocols of Flinders University, HREC project approval number 5140. We would like to thank the students who granted permission for us to use their quotations in this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 As Rapanta, Botturi, Goodyear, Guàrdia and Koole (Citation2020) argue, it is important to note the difference between online teaching and the sort of emergency remote teaching imposed by the pandemic.
2 And this is why this article is not centred on online learning but more on general issues at the convergence of online learning, life writing, and student engagement.
3 Our format is two contact hours: one-hour lecture and one-hour tutorial. The lecture and majority of tutorials stayed online. There was one face-to-face tutorial. Since the focus of this article is the online context, we will not speak much about the face-to-face class except to say that we used mostly the same materials and in-class activities but the delivery strategies were obviously different.
4 For more on the ‘six-word memoir’, see www.sixwordmemoirs.com. ‘Rank your truth texts’ ask students to ‘Please rank these in terms of which you think are more likely to be “true” to less likely (and why?)’. ‘Amateur biographer’ asks students to ‘think of someone you know well and have a high regard for. Write two sentences about this person that reflect something important about them/their life.’ ‘Family historian’ asks students, ‘How do you know what you know about your family tree? Have a quick think/jot down how you would go about writing your own family history and stories’, with the aim of having them think about method. ‘Dear younger me’ asks students, ‘What would you like to tell your eight-year-old self about your life now? Major themes? Have a go at writing sentences.’
5 Our students were able to choose online or face-to-face tutorials during this particular semester. They were also allocated groups according to whether or not they would use video and audio or audio only.
6 And this is perhaps a subject for another article. We counselled them against doing this, particularly at this historical moment, because we knew that we (and the university generally) were not well-resourced to support students if such writings triggered emotional distress. But it became clear to us that, at this time, perhaps for obvious reasons, many students wanted to write stories about their grandparents.
7 I also asked more specific questions, such as: What does the object look/feel like? What feelings or memories does it evoke? What does this object represent? To others/to me?
8 ‘As Gopnik, Wolfe, and others claim, we can never know the inside of a dog because we cannot fully experience a canine world according to their senses, and we cannot translate those experiences into language. To assume that we could is to fall into the trap of popular posthumanism, and to end up appropriating the subjectivities of other species for ideological ends’ (Huff and Haefner Citation2012, 154).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Kate Douglas
Kate Douglas is Professor in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University. Her most recent book is Children and Biography: Reading and Writing Life Stories (Bloomsbury, 2022). She is the co-director of the Flinders Life Narrative Research Group and the leader of the International Auto/Biography Association’s Asia-Pacific chapter.
Kylie Cardell
Kylie Cardell is a Senior Lecturer in the College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Flinders University. Kylie teaches and researches contemporary life narrative, is co-director of the Flinders Life Narrative Research Group, and Essays editor for the journal Life Writing.
Marina Deller
Marina Deller is an Adelaide-based writer and PhD candidate at Flinders University. Their research concerns grief and trauma life narratives and material storytelling. They write about identity, bodies, grief, and public/private spheres. Marina teaches Creative Writing and English Literature and is affiliated with the Flinders Life Narrative Research Group.
Edith Hill
Edith Hill is a PhD candidate, research assistant, and tutor at Flinders University. Her research investigates health and wellness life narratives on YouTube, with a particular interest in life writing ethics, representations of children, health and wellness hoaxes, and relational lives. She is affiliated with the Flinders Life Narrative Research Group.