Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic during 2020 resulted in researchers and teachers making the temporary and stressful shift to work remotely. While much research explores the ‘how’ of online teaching and learning, the affect of this on Spanish as a world language teachers (SWLTs) is underexplored. Working with SWLTs in Australia, I conducted social media scroll-back interviews amidst the COVID-19 lockdown in Australia. These interviews involved SWLTs screensharing, scrolling through their Facebook timelines and narrating posts related to the research topic. SWLTs highlighted the entanglement of COVID-19, pedagogy, policy, and politics through/with their Facebook timelines during the lockdown and the affect this generated in ways unique to SWLTs. Hence, this chapter aims to explore the potential for social media scroll-back method in emergency remote world language education (ER WLE) research and the generative affects of this. Using a diffractive reading to visibilise differences, I explore the nuanced material-discursive-social-political-digital entanglements in conversation with SWLTs asking: What are the generative affects of these entanglements and why do they matter? What emerged were unexpected examples of how this method interrupts traditional understandings of agency when research engages with alternative data such as wonder, hesitation and shame which I hope contributes to a (re)imagining of ER WLE.
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Notes
- 1.
All names of SWLTs in this chapter are pseudonyms
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank A/Professor Liz MacKinlay and Dr. Adriana Díaz for their support in developing this methodology. I also wish to express my sincerest gratitude to the SWLTs who so enthusiastically worked with me in this project. This research was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship.
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Heinrichs, D.H. (2021). The Generative Affects of Social Media Scroll-Back Interviews: In Conversation with Spanish as a World Language Teachers During the COVID-19 Lockdown in Australia. In: Chen, J. (eds) Emergency Remote Teaching and Beyond. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84067-9_17
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