Phillips, L.G., Coleman, K. & Burke, G. (2020). Teaching and Learning in COVID-19 times study: An art and science collaboration. Humanities in the Regions 2020: The two cultures in dangerous times.
Teachers are at the frontline in ensuring learning continues during COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, though there has been minimal consultation with teachers. At very short notice, teachers across all sectors have needed to significantly reconfigure their teaching and practices. The changes in education are global, urgent and look to alter education practices from this point onwards. It is a time of rapid innovation, novel partnerships, and enhanced questions of access. As a group of educational and arts-based researchers (networked via online platforms) we recognised that these changing practices needed to be documented and analysed urgently to support teaching and learning within these less familiar social configurations remotely and locally. Through an online qualitative survey we have gathered hundreds of teacher’s experiences of the effect and affect of COVID-19 on teaching and learning located in Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Singapore, and the USA. In this presentation, we share how we are beginning to interpret the survey data by playing and curating with digital humanities/ data science tools voyant and omeka. We talk about what these science tools are enabling us to see and how we may begin to see opportunities to create/ make art with the data to draw attention to matters of concern in teaching and learning in COVID-19. This is emergent work in progress.