The Pandemic Pedagogy Handbook

Kate Cooper, Louise Creechan, Lucinda Matthews-Jones, Aimee Merrydew, Yolana Pringle, Manuela Williams, Jamie Wood

Research output: Book/ReportOther report

Abstract

In 2020, History departments suddenly had to think seriously about how to move teaching online. For most, this ‘emergency phase’ was a daunting and challenging time, but for some historians, there was also a sense of cautious excitement. As a subject-area, we have tended to prefer physical settings and interactions over digital ones. The Canadian historian Dr Sean Kheraj has observed that COVID-19 is making us use tools that are unfamiliar to many historians and forcing us to upskill to work within a digital landscape that we have often overlooked.

At History UK, we recognised a need to support the history community during this time of transition. From late May 2020, a group of Steering Committee members have been meeting to discuss how to do this. We have run a series of Twitter chats to see what colleagues have learned from the new role online learning has come to play, and have written a series of short posts (on learning design, lectures, contact hours, assessment, accessibility, and community building in the classroom and in wider cohorts) and gathered feedback from the wider community.

Finally, we have produced this short guide to help colleagues in thinking about what it means to move our teaching online. We have framed it around a number of questions:

1. What happens to our students’ experience of learning, in and out of the ‘classroom’?
2. What happens to accessibility?
3. What happens to community?
4. What happens to seminars?
5. What happens to primary source work?
6. What happens to lectures?
7. What happens to assessment and feedback?

This is not the end of our commitment to creating a space for collaborative conversations around pedagogy in the time of a global pandemic. Please share your insights via the comments section on this webpage or with @history_uk using #PandemicPedagogy. We are especially interested to hear from you if you have practical examples of approaches to teaching History online. Do pass the Handbook on to colleagues and encourage them to engage with our work. We are also interested in receiving feedback on the Pandemic Pedagogy Handbook itself. Please do let us know if it has informed your practice.
Original languageEnglish
Place of PublicationUnited Kingdom
Number of pages16
Publication statusPublished - 31 Jul 2020

Keywords

  • education
  • pandemic
  • online learning
  • online teaching

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'The Pandemic Pedagogy Handbook'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this