Framework to Navigate the Virtual Classroom Space

This chapter addresses the need to develop sustainable and contextual teaching-learning processes with the paradigm shift in pedagogy due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Descriptive factors associated with preference for mode of learning was determined through a survey among 169 teachers and 388 students from engineering, humanities, and science backgrounds in South India. Thereafter, a qualitative study was carried out on selected survey respondents. The main research questions raised were: What are the expectations of teachers while teaching online? What are the expectations of students while learning online? What are the outcomes of online teaching-learning (teachers' and students' perspectives)? How can online teaching-learning be improved? Qualitative inquiry, through questionnaires and interview, was carried out among 15 teachers and 17 students. Thematic analysis was carried out. The findings gave rise to the formulation of a framework to navigate the virtual classroom space.

Addressing Student Isolation During the Pandemic: An Inquiry into Renewing Relationships and Reimagining Classroom Communities on Remote Instruction Platforms

We began this pandemic cycle of inquiry by acknowledging that we all viewed relationships with our students as foundational to the teaching and learning process (i.e., Elmore, 2004; Fullan, 2007; Noddings, 2014; Rimm-Kaufman, et al., 2014). While we had well-established strategies for creating caring classroom communities in our face-to-face classrooms prior to the pandemic, we were all searching for new online strategies for keeping relationships vital when faced with the abrupt transition to remote instruction and the isolating effects of the Spring 2020 lockdown, both for ourselves and for our students. Hence, we committed to documenting and sharing with one another, the innovative strategies we were employing across our elementary and secondary school contexts. Through the use of informal sharing time and Zoom breakout rooms, we were able to connect personally with our students and to revitalize teacher-to-student and student-to-student relationships in our virtual classroom space.

Classroom Space and Creative Student Engagement: A Focus on the Sri Lankan Drama Classroom

Effective drama teaching and learning needs physical space: space for performance, expression, interaction and exploration. However, the Sri Lankan classroom environment remains largely unexplored in terms of investigating the relationship between the physical classroom environment and the teaching and learning of drama when process drama is the method of instruction. This article is based on the findings of a non-randomised control group intervention study, which involved forty classroom observations in secondary schools in Sri Lanka. The observations showed that students who were able to use the school’s open-air theatre for the entire intervention period engaged in far more collaborative, energetic, performative and creative behaviours than other classes who were in a confined classroom space with desks and chairs crammed closely together. Implications for the teaching of drama by different methods are discussed in the Sri Lankan context.

The Moodoo Library: Quantitative Metrics to Model How Teachers Make Use of the Classroom Space by Analysing Indoor Positioning Traces (Extended Abstract)

Teachers’ spatial behaviours in the classroom can strongly influence students’ engagement, motivation and other behaviours that shape their learning. However, classroom teaching behav-iour is ephemeral, and has largely remained opaque to computational analysis. This paper presents a library called ‘Moodoo’ that can serve to automatically model how teachers make use of the classroom space by analysing indoor positioning traces. The system automatically ex-tracts spatial metrics (e.g. teacher-student ratios, frequency of visits to students’ personal spaces, presence in classroom spaces of interest, index of dispersion and entropy), mapping from the teachers’ low-level positioning data to higher-order spatial constructs.

Educational Research and Practice

Teachers must innovatively bring the best out of learning situation, classroom space and available learning resources. However, very few and mostly not serious researches have been published on effects of seat arrangements on cognition, lesson delivery and classroom control. This article was aimed at highlighting the principles and clarify the context in which school proprietors and teachers (of both elementary and secondary schools) can choose or make innovations on three popular student seating arrangements: the traditional long rows,(with its variants, stadium, theatre , or angled row seats), the U-shape or horseshoe design and the paired module (two or three person per desk) row by column design. These are discussed: based on their original design principles, literature on their usage, the researcher’s students-centered experiments on their limitations. The arrangement of pair desk modules was shown to be the best in all situation, easy to readjust into pod-community like design and into u-shape when appropriate, given its flexibility, advantage in time before lesson, and with the optimum results.

The Classroom Re-Imagined and Re-Designed: The Pandemic-Ready Teaching and Learning Station

Save for the most callous among us, all of humanity knows the chaos wreaked upon the world by the Covid 19 Virus. The losses are of unspeakable proportions. Those losses continue. Among those losses is lost educational opportunity for our children and young adults. The debate among world experts continues unabated: when should we re-open schools? At what levels? Under what conditions? What are the potential perils? How do we assess the effects of viral mutations and variants? There is so much that we have yet to learn that, at best, we are making educated guesses; at worst, we yield to denial and despair. This paper charts the efforts made by various countries to deal with the impact of education on schools, colleges and universities. Given the vast differences in resources; the availability of medical and other expertise; innovativeness; and political will and the humility of political leadership to follow the advice of scientists, the responses have been markedly different. Not unusually, the poorer the country, the greater is the suffering. In this paper, we use Guyana as representative of nations bereft of those things we have just mentioned.However, even in nations that are blessed with the wherewithal for managing and minimizing the impact of this deadly pandemic, education has suffered. In poor countries, this damage may be almost irreparable for decades to come. The overall international quest has been to find a way to re-open educational institutions safely. Outside schooling, social distancing, hand-washing, and the wearing of masks have been vital ameliorating tools. Some places have used plexiglass to separate students and prevent the exhalation and inhalation of droplets. Other countries have simply followed uncritically what richer and more resourceful countries have done. Many countries have simply denied the fact of the pandemic or have simply guessed their way along. Denial and guess-work have lead to catastrophic results. In this paper, we have attempted a solution that involves the re-imagining and re-designing of the traditional classroom space into being a Teaching and Learning Station. This innovation, in our opinion, almost guarantees the safe re-opening of schools. It ensures the safe return to in-person teaching and learning, and it prepares us for inevitable future pandemics. We have offered up the design with the hope that it may be taken up and acted upon.