Redesigning applied Phonology for a Virtual Classroom: teimagining Kinesthetic activities

Resumen

Engaging a student in active and meaningful learning, which has traditionally occurred in physical spaces, has transcended. With ongoing advances in technology and recently spurred by an unprecedented pandemic, meaningful learning is transitioning to virtual spaces. By accessing digital tools, course instructors now create engaging online learning spaces where learners invest directly in their own learning by interacting virtually with classmates and by doing academic activities and socially oriented activities (Bigatel & Edel-Malizia, 2017). In these recently created virtual classrooms, course instructors are able to model kinesthetic activities and guide online learners to use their entire body for doing physical actions that support the processing of new information such as in the teaching of applied phonology. Such educational experiences become further enhanced when these virtual learning spaces embody a teaching presence, a social presence, and a cognitive presence. As outlined by the Community of Inquiry Framework, an instructor’s virtual teaching presence directly affects social presence and cognitive presence in this mutually shared space (Garrison et al., 2010). Together, these three types of presence impact the learners’ sense of community and overall satisfaction with the virtual learning process (Blain, 2019). Similar to other course instructors, teacher educators have also been converting their courses to virtual modalities (Foulger et al., 2017). To that end and as part of a larger study (Prado et al., 2020), the current study documents and explores emerging teacher presence during the online transition of an applied phonology course which, for over a decade, has been a major cornerstone within an ESL master’s degree at a university in the southeastern United States. This study also examines the corresponding transition in reimagining kinesthetic activities from this course’s former physical space to its redesigned virtual space.