Art meets reflective teaching: exploring the experience of teaching higher education arts courses during emergency remote learning

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation offers an example of how arts-based educational research can be a space to inquire about and explore the complexities of one’s own teaching practice and in this case teaching undergraduate arts courses during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the pandemic led to me emergency remote teaching, I began creating digital art and reflecting on how this experience was affecting my teaching practice. This visual art data and corresponding artist narrative data were then analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke, 2006). Guiding this study were two questions: Q1: How did I experience a lack of connection with my students due to emergency remote teaching? Q2: How did technology play a role in my emergency remote teaching practice? Within this study, I share six themes and two sub-themes in response to the first research question, while the second research question resulted in six themes and three sub-themes that capture not only my posed questions but my experience in general.