Rethinking the phenomenological meaningfulness of bodily presence and absence in online education
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31874/2309-1606-2024-30-2-7Keywords:
online presence, absence, embodiment, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenologyAbstract
Online education was once considered a convenient and flexible educational channel. However, COVID-19 forced most teachers and students to have no other option but to move lessons online. Academic publications on online presence can be categorised into two independent fields: theoretical discussions and practical frameworks for improving online presence. Among these publications, some authors are holding pessimistic attitudes towards the idea of online presence. Some of them, following Heideggerian Gelassenheit, argue that online education is more or less a result of participants’ exhibition of controlled and judgemental performances due to its disembodiment, which freezes the reality and is devoted to calculative thinking. Others, following the Levinasian phenomenology of the face, claim that online education, with the screen as the barrier, jeopardises the embodied sensitivity and responsiveness of teachers’ ethical attuning to students. To negotiate with these authors, we would like to remind them of its possibility. Therefore, we draw on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment to introduce an opinion confirming online presence in education. We then point out the danger of reducing learning to the state of being present in classes, whether bodily or virtually, by inviting readers to rethink “absence” as a concealed side of presence and to confirm the roles of absence and presence in co-constructing a person’s perception of things. We thus emphasise the importance of teachers’ and students’ intentionality to teach or to learn, which determines the effects of online education. Finally, this study concludes with a post-digital view that beckons us to transcend the current debate of teaching online or offline, recognising a blurred boundary between the virtual and bricks-and-mortar modes of education.
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