No student is left out: Making every learner's voice heard and its impact on re-establishing social presence and communities of learning

Abstract

This workshop is designed with dual objectives: (i) to model teaching in a virtual environment with recognised good practices, and (ii) to empower practitioners from all disciplines with the confidence and skill to overcome teaching challenges in their own HE context. With the drastic shift to an (all-)online mode of teaching and learning (T&L) since 2020 brought about by the global pandemic, HE practitioners acknowledge the need to challenge themselves to explore how to capitalise upon the affordances of virtual platforms and digital technology to maximise student learning. As a teacher educator, I have been striving to ensure that T&L is not compromised in the ‘new’ mode in my active search to turn obstacles into opportunities. With my I-N-S-P-I-R-E initiative in the past academic year, I feel humbled to have been presented with my Faculty’s Emergency Remote Teaching Award and the University Teaching Innovation Award 2020. Encapsulated in I-N-S-P-I-R-E is a set of strategies highlighting Inquiry, Novelty, Student voice, Presence, Innovation, Reflection and Excellence – key elements guiding the workshop design. At the workshop, opportunities will be created for co-workers to engage in a joint exploration of how salient educational issues in relation to diversity, equality and inclusivity in the online classroom are addressed. Specifically, I will model how virtual space can be manipulated by the teacher for each individual’s voice to be valued in order for students’ social presence to be (re-)established , learning community (re-)built and learning motivation (re-)ignited. Through adopting an experiential inquiry-and-activity-based approach, my goal is to simulate an authentic online T&L setting where participants feel inspired by the strategies observed and empowered to imagine how these novel practices may be adapted for use in their own virtual classrooms to encourage equal participation, embrace diversity, ensure every voice is heard as well as optimise learning.