Instructor Identity in the Age of COVID: A Sociolinguistic Study

• In Event: AERA Research in Progress Roundtable Session Five
  In Invited Roundtable: Research-in-Progress RT023 (Sunday)

Abstract

This study explores how the rapid transition from face-to-face to remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic affected a contingent university instructor’s teaching identity as he moved from the face-to-face modality to remote online learning. Conventional course-design frameworks normally require months of collaborative work between faculty and instructional designers, but the emergency shift in Spring 2020 collapsed those timelines into mere days or weeks. Instructional design literature describes how instructors usually begin to identify as online instructors during this collaborative work. This author seeks to understand, through discourse analysis of a single faculty member’s narrative, how their language could reflect this identity change when these traditional structures and supports are abruptly removed.

Author

• Sarah Sangregorio, Montclair State University