Disorienting spaces: Engaging the multiple “student” in online learning

Effective student engagement in learning is not a simple transposition of practices from the traditional classroom to the online environment, and strategies for engaging students may work less well in the unbounded spaces of interaction of the Internet where assumed understandings of teaching and learning have less hold. Even experienced practitioners encounter unexpected outcomes when designing pedagogies to engage students online, and in a range of studies students have been found to show great variation in how they engage in online learning. This study explores the complexities of shifting teaching practices to online spaces and the effects on the interactions of participants. One of these effects is the disorientation reported by practitioners in their attempts to apply strategies to engage students online. This paper investigates the mismatch between expectations of teaching academics and students by focussing on what the “student” is online. I use two analytical moves: a discourse analysis of practitioners interviews to identify “ways of talking” about students, and Annemarie Mol’s (2002; 1999) concept of enactment to understand student activity and identity in the interactive spaces of online learning. My argument is that understanding the category of “student” as enacted in multiple versions offers a way to approach the “potentially disorienting spaces” (Bayne and Ross, 2007) of teaching practices in online spaces.