Academic readiness and collaborative communities in online block teaching: a Lefebvrian case study

Harkin, Benjamin ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1446-9673 (2021) Academic readiness and collaborative communities in online block teaching: a Lefebvrian case study. Learning and teaching in action, 14 (1). pp. 1-8. ISSN 1477-1241

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Abstract

My experiences and observations of online block-teaching (OBT) in Psychology at Manchester Met acted as the trigger for the present paper. For example, an insightful colleague captured the often one-sided experience of teaching online, thus: “It helps if you think of yourself as a radio presenter!” I wanted to investigate this and other observations of OBT and to this end I provide a novel application of Lefebvre’s Trialectic of Space (1991). Specifically, in a recent paper we employed Lefebvre’s Trialectic to understand how tutors and students use and experience the hybrid pedagogical approach of online and block teaching (Harkin & Nerantzi, in press). Lefebvre saw space not as a passive container but rather as an active arena that interacts with and produces thought and behaviour; i.e., the produced social space. The model integrated physical, mental and social space to unify the main elements of the produced space, which in spatial terms he referred to as ‘Spatial Practice’, ‘Representations of Space’ and ‘Representational Space’, respectively (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 40). I will outline each arm of Lefebvre’s model and within each, frame and explain some of my key observations on student’s and tutor’s experiences in OBT (Figure 1), and where appropriate offer recommendations for practice. The benefits of looking at the OBT space in this way was noted by LestonBandeira (2020) who stated that if we “consider the online space as a new space, and … online learning as a new mode of learning” then we will “start … [to get] a feel for what needs to be done to guide your student’s in their learning” (p.1).