Symposium 3: What is it like for a learner to participate in a Zoom Breakout Room session?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.54337/nlc.v13.8582Keywords:
Zoom video-conferencing, Breakout room, Phenomenology of practice, Covid-19, Lived experience, Presence, The Pivot, Small group learning, Collaborative learningAbstract
Though virtual classrooms are not new, the COVID-19 pandemic sent many teachers and students online for the first time. This paper examines the use of a web-based video conferencing tool, Zoom, and in particular, the use of breakout rooms as part of a student’s learning experience. We ask: what is it like for a learner to participate in a Zoom Breakout Room session? Using Max van Manen’s (2016) phenomenology of practice, we collected learners’ lived experience descriptions of participating in a Zoom breakout room, then reflected on them phenomenologically as a way to generate new insights into this recently common online learning experience. Four moments are portrayed: a learner’s arrest at the announcement of breakout rooms; a learner’s transition into a breakout room as existential suspension; surveilling self and others in a breakout room; and exiting the breakout room as a moment of foreclosure and re-disorientation. The paper compares Zoom breakout rooms with aspects of video-gaming and notices a detriment to Freirean problem-posing education if students can avoid standing, unmediated, behind just their words, even in the relative safety of a small group of peers.
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Copyright (c) 2022 Felicity Healey-Benson, Mike Johnson, Catherine Adams, Joni Turville
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