Hope during COVID-19: a poetic inquiry of early career academics

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause global upheaval. It had a significant impact on the field of education, with multiple lockdowns changing the nature of teaching. This has been particularly challenging for early career academics (ECA) who already experience heightened stresses in the field of academia. This article explores the impact of COVID-19 on three ECAs who are Health, Outdoor and Physical Education (HOPE) teacher educators. Using poetic inquiry, this article explores our experiences of teaching experiential content in an online environment during an extended lockdown. Engaging in this process highlighted the personal and professional challenges we faced, including work-life balance, teaching online, and staying up to date with research and leadership commitments. It also highlighted significant opportunities, including affirming good pedagogy and building a sense of community. Ultimately, engaging in this process highlighted a sense of hope and provided an opportunity for the three authors to grow as educators.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• physical education
• outdoor
• health and physical education
• early career researcher

Introduction

Interest in academic workloads has soared over the past two decades (Bosanquet et al., 2017). Unsurprisingly, so too has the interest and awareness of the ‘early career’ experience, particularly in the areas of career progression (Caretta et al., 2018); and other narratives that highlight the challenges and changing nature of early career positions in academia (Bosanquet et al., 2017; McAlpine & Amundsen, 2018). It is generally accepted that the expectations on early career researchers, or rather academics as we discuss below, are ‘multiple and demanding’ (Caretta et al., 2018, p. 262). Excellence is demanded in all portfolios of the position, at pace – often with added responsibilities of service such as program coordination and marketing activities, during a scholarly period characterised by fierce competition and a high publication rejection rate (Coleman et al., 2021). Pitt and Mewburn (2016) suggest that academic employers are looking for ‘academic super-hero[s], who are capable of being everything to everyone … ’ (p. 99).

Early career academics (ECA) enter a workforce which has been heavily shaped by neoliberal reforms (McLachlan, 2017). The pressure that this places on ECA’s has been noted across academia (Enright et al., 2017), but a growing body of work has highlighted the impact that these reforms have on novice health outdoor and physical education (HOPE) educators. This literature has highlighted how reforms have led to an intensification of academic work, through heavier teaching loads (Barker, 2017), increased reporting (McLachlan, 2017), and an increased emphasis on performance and productivity (Casey & Fletcher, 2017; McLachlan, 2017). Additionally, this work highlights the pressure ECA’s feel to acquire funding, particularly if they want to increase their research allocation (Barker, 2017). This often involves competing for funded projects that are outside the scope of their research interest and experience (Barker, 2017; Casey & Fletcher, 2017). Ultimately, this body of work highlights the vulnerable status of HOPE ECAs, in a neoliberal system, who are often the first to feel and the least likely to manage performative stress and pressure (Rynne et al., 2017). This has been exacerbated by COVID-19 and it is under this context that we aim to contribute to this important discussion.

COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. Since then, the pandemic has swept through the world leaving little unchanged. In Victoria, Australia, the context in which we base this article, the state Premier – The Hon. Daniel Andrews – firstly urged, then enforced ‘if you can stay at home, you must stay at home’ and further ‘if you can work from home, you must work from home’.¹ This resulted in the rapid reorganisation of all Victorian academics and students from a predominately face-to-face model of teaching and learning to an online model, in the space of just a few days. It is as teacher educators and early career academics that we aim to examine and share our collective experiences, the highs and lows, of working in Health, Outdoor and Physical Education (HOPE)² at a regional university in Victoria, Australia during this distinctive time. At the outset we wish to acknowledge our gratitude and privileged positions in society as employed, white, young-ish, middle-class men living in Victoria. We know how lucky we are to be in the positions we are in, regardless of hard work. Rather than a critique of academic life, this article aims to explore how three HOPE ECAs navigated this world under multiple waves of COVID-19 induced lockdowns during the 2020/2021 academic years.

‘Early career’ employees in higher education are commonly referred to as either early career researchers (ECR) or early career academics (ECA). Bosanquet et al. (2017) believe the latter term is more useful as it ‘encompasses the full scope of academic work’ (p. 891), in our case, teaching, research, fieldwork, administration, leadership, and other service activities. In Australia, the definition of early career is formally associated with the length of time following the successful examination of one’s PhD, in this case five years (Australian Research Council, 2020). However, Sutherland and Willis (2013), are more fluid in defining early career ‘as academics within the first seven years of their first permanent academic appointment’ (p. 8). McAlpine and Amundsen (2018), include doctoral candidates. In our case, we are writing primarily during the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns as a team of one post-doctoral academic (within the five-year timeframe) and two doctoral candidates. We are all beginning our ‘second career’ in the higher education sector, having previously worked as teachers.

In an interview, with the national broadcaster, Professor Andrew Norton stated that the impact of COVID-19 on the higher education sector ‘could be multi-decade [in their] consequences’ (Fitzgerald, 2020) and we assert this will certainly be the case for HOPE disciplines. In Victoria, at the time of writing, we were moving out of our second wave of tight lockdown restrictions. At the university level, we had been teaching remotely since mid-March of 2020. There had been no ‘prac’, no fieldwork, no face-to-face teaching at any level in the HOPE area since the start. Our COVID experiences, as you will see in the poetic performances, required us to think reflexively and engage positively with research-based contemporary approaches to teaching and learning. Engaging in the process helped us to realise that we, as HOPE ECAs, must become more robust and adaptable to a remote model of teaching and learning to build resilience and help safeguard the long-term viability of HOPE education and our academic careers.

Teaching online during a global pandemic

There has been a steady rise in online enrolments over the last twenty years, making online learning a significant presence in most Australian universities. Blended learning has also become increasingly the norm at tertiary institutions (Alammary et al., 2014). This approach, which combines online learning with face-to-face instruction, has become so popular at the course level (Drysdale et al., 2013) that from our observations and experience almost all students studying at tertiary level in Australia engage in some variant of the blended learning model.

The adoption of online learning has been of interest within academic discourse. Research has pointed to several benefits associated with online learning, including providing the ability to reach a wider audience (Downing et al., 2019; Dumford & Miller, 2018) – specifically for students who come from a diverse background or those traditionally disadvantaged in their access to the educational system (Dumford & Miller, 2018). It allows more flexibility in balancing work, family and other commitments (Downing et al., 2019). Conversely, critiques of online learning highlight the possible harms associated with it, including:

• negatively impacting student engagement (Dumford & Miller, 2018)

• creating a sense of isolation (Downing et al., 2019)

• frustration due to technical considerations (for teachers and students) (Downing et al., 2019; Dumford & Miller, 2018)

• lower teaching quality (Downing et al., 2019)

• increased workloads for faculty (Dumford & Miller, 2018).

These debates over the potential advantages versus disadvantages provide a clear rationale for why online learning has become a common practice but has not been unequivocally adopted as a sole model of instruction at tertiary institutions.

The emergence of a global pandemic changed this – the need to stop the spread of the virus causing people to stay home to meet public health directions, forced higher education to adapt. The introduction of rules to restrict mass gatherings and enforce social distancing resulted in a massive shift to online learning teaching methods. The rapid transition to fully online learning had a particularly significant impact on experiential curricular areas such as HOPE. This transition made the delivery of practical components either significantly challenging or impossible. HOPE educators around the country scrambled to develop curriculum that could be delivered at a distance via an online platform.

As shown above, the upheaval caused by COVID created several challenges for educators. This includes the impact on ECA’s around the world – heightening the implicit and explicit institutional demands and performance expectations placed on ECAs (Enright et al., 2017). The body of ECA literature examined in this article highlights the pressures that ECAs felt pre-pandemic. The intensification of academic workloads, and the litany of other pressures, that was happening then, was further impacted as the move to online learning meant that more of our already reduced workload allocations had to be spent on service and teaching to shift subjects into this new format. All the while continuing to struggle to find suitable time to work on research commitments that are needed to progress within the neo-liberal system (Barker, 2017). As ECAs, we had to manage these challenges while balancing the effects of the pandemic on our professional and personal lives. Notably, in HOPE, we also had to balance these issues while facing the challenges of delivering practical curriculum in an online environment. This had a significant impact on us as individuals, as we tried to navigate an academic landscape that is already treacherous and increasingly difficult to navigate (Enright et al., 2017), but was intensified by this global pandemic.

To explore our experiences as ECAs in a time of ‘distress’, we engaged in a process of shared reflection to gain a unique insight into our experiences and practice during a time of significant social upheaval. Our reflections are represented in the form of a poetic inquiry that reflexively explores our experiences as ECAs with leadership and teaching commitments in HOPE subject areas during the pandemic. Two major questions prefaced our reflection. First, what is the experience of ECAs trying to navigate rapid change both in relation to our field of expertise and career choice? Second, what impact did teaching HOPE during strict pandemic lockdowns have on us as ECAs? These questions highlighted several challenges we faced, both professionally and personally, in our day to day working lives. To address these challenges, we turn to the methodology that was utilised to help us reflexively engage with our pandemic experiences.

Methodology

Poetic inquiry is an emergent methodology (Owton, 2017). It is gaining popularity in broader social sciences and educational research (e.g. Legge, 2015). Poetic inquiry can be thought of as a collection of methodologies (Prendergast, 2009) that use poetic forms that sometimes push boundaries on what is considered poetry. We employee a reflexive poetic process to better understand our collective experiences as three ECAs during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Our poetic inquiry is performed as an exercise in reflexivity (Faulkner et al., 2016). Reflexivity is, as Faulkner argues, a term full of ambiguity. We deploy this term to describe the interwoven nature of our poetic work, where boundaries between reflexive process and poetic methods/analytical writing are blurred. We employ the term reflexivity with due caution to inform our poetic/writing processes. It allows us to go beyond a recount of our shared experiences and disturb the ways ‘we see, live, and understand ourselves’ (Smith, 2020, p. 877). We approach our performance of reflexivity using a constructivist position (Lincoln et al., 2018). Through this position, we explore our locally constructed realities to explore subjectivist epistemological processes.

In this paper, we present two examples of researcher-voiced poems (Prendergast, 2009). The first is a collection of found poems that emerged from a shared experience of reflective journaling. We began this process by each taking the time to journal our experiences during the mid-semester break in June of 2020. This writing is a way of reflexively thinking about our shared experiences of a rapid shift to online learning early in the pandemic. From the ethnographic journals, we then worked to ‘find’ poetry within our texts (Pate, 2014) through the stripping back process explained below.

During the mid-semester break, each of us wrote a free-form reflection based on our experience of COVID-19 as early career academics at a regional university. The focus of these reflections was to capture the experience of shifting our pedagogies from a mostly face-to-face and applied context to an online and remote online environment. The reflections followed our own interests and avenues of thought. From here, it was a process that we derived where we stripped back the texts through a continual back-and-forth process of reading (including reading aloud) ↔ stripping back. It was this process that saw reflexive poetry emerge from our journals.

The finding of the poetry was laden with ethical responsibility to ensure to ensure the ‘“whats”, “whys” and/or the “hows” of experience’ (Owton, 2017, p. 45) remained reflective of the original text. As part of this, the poems remain true to the chronology of the original texts. They are also presented (almost) verbatim, with interventions from us in each other’s texts limited to punctuation and sparing tense changes. Further, upon completion of each other’s poetry we went through a process of member checking and co-editing. A discussion then followed this where we searched for moments (Hartung et al., 2017) in our poems to unpick the challenges and opportunities that are presented in our poetic performances. These poetic processes do not aim to representational; rather, through them, we share our own reflexive practices and in turn, our collective experiences of teaching HOPE as ECAs during COVID-19. Our poetry then paves the way for further reflexive analysis in our discussion.

Our poems do not necessarily subscribe to the traditions of poetry but still reassemble poetry ‘in beauty, effect, which is a rhythmically written expression of emotion or ideas in an arrangement of words/verse’ (Owton, 2017, p. 44), they do, however, adopt a sharp and concise use of language (Leavy, 2020). Thus, we adopt the term ‘poem-ish’ (Lahman et al., 2019) to best describe our poetic works. Our poetry also uses negative space for emphasis, in doing so we work in homage to those who have performed this with precision and beauty (see: Faulkner, 2020).

The poems allow a creative exploration of our understanding of our experiences. Poetry has proved a unique tool for communicating various aspects of the pandemic (Lahman et al., 2021) – and in sharing our versions of the collective experience. We created poetry from reflective journals to facilitate reflexive thinking and allow a greater understanding of the phenomenon – constructed through our collective experiences (Lincoln et al., 2018).

The poems offer the reader an opportunity to engage with each of us individually. They allow a more personalised connection to our experiences than other forms of text might allow. Hence our paper is polyvocal in nature (Creamer, 2006), where we present our voices’ in the form of our reflexive poems coupled with a collective authorial narration. However, we note that the poetry, although tied to each of us as individuals, contains multiple voices’ creating a heteroglossic text (see: Bakhtin, 1981). That is to acknowledge our individual voices are already laden with meaning and multiple interwoven voices are present within our individual accounts.

Through sharing our experience as poetry, we worked consciously to move it from, in the words of Mitchell et al. (2013) ‘linear thinking that is evident in transcripts’, or in our case, stream of consciousness journaling, to ‘to a more embodied form of text that represents feelings and essences, expressed in poetic forms’ (p. 97). Poetry allowed us to express ourselves in emotionally poignant and epigrammatic texts.

We find it necessary at this junction to introduce ourselves. We have chosen to do so poetically, using our second form of poems in the form of tweets.

We have chosen to introduce ourselves using ‘tweets’ as poetry as they play with visual poetry in the form where meaning text and form are inseparable (Polkinhorn, 1993). The tweets were created using Tweetgen, which allowed us to follow the style form and function of Twitter after-the-fact (TweetGenBETA, 2020). Tweets are often poetic in form (Sears, 2019) and share similar linguistic styles to other forms of poetry in that they are both carefully crafted and epigrammatic. Our tweets were crafted, drawing inspiration from the academic email signature, which we observe as becoming a hallmark of recent achievements. In employing such as method, we aim to ‘surprise both ourselves and our audiences with new possibilities’ (Butler-Kisber & Stewart, 2009). We further unfold our individual stories, assumptions and lived experience about this dramatic shift to online learning through our found poetry.

Through the crafting of both of collections of poetry, we were continuously conscious of our ethical processes, which is often considered problematic in work such as this (see: Edwards, 2021). Our ethical processes were underpinned by creating an open generative space in which all three authors felt that our ideas could be openly expressed without judgment from others. Rather, we all remarked on the warm reception that our research meetings presented to share ideas during a challenging time, professionally and personally. Furthermore, during the creation of our reflexive journals, all details were shared voluntarily, with each author allowing themselves the space to present what they wanted rather than writing to a prescribed set of prompts of questions. Finally, during the finding of our poems, which constituted the first stage of our analysis we undertook multiple member-checking processes to ensure each of our final poems, was an accurate representation of our individual experiences.

We conclude our methodological thinking with this point. It is hoped that by sharing our experience, the ups and downs of our early experiences of the pandemic, it will help other early career researchers, particularly those who face much steeper challenges and competition in gaining and performing academic roles than what we face. Like many other research studies, we have noticed that early career literature often ‘pulverize life into minute abstracted fragments and participles’ (van Manen, 1990). This sits at the heart of why we have chosen to use poetry. By using poetry, we aim to re-humanise our academic lives, if only for a moment, and to share with you an authentic imprint of our reflexive process.

Discussion and analysis

In examining the poems, we were influenced by the work of Hartung and colleagues (2017), who examined their poetic subjectivities as ECAs in the neoliberal university. Similar to their approach, we played with a number of different ways to analyse and present the poems. The emphasis on poetic inquiry pushed us to find a way to present our understandings of our shared stories in an alternative way. Influenced by Hartung and colleagues’ approach (2017), we decided to draw out the ‘moments’ in the poems that were most relevant to us as a collective because of the similarities that they highlighted in our ECA journeys. We unpack examples of such moments by categorising them into the shared challenges and opportunities we navigated as HOPE ECAs in a time of distress.

Challenges

Personal

Our initial experiences in academia were like other ECAs in the field of Sport and PE pedagogy (Barker, 2017; Enright et al., 2017) as we tried to manage the demands and expectations associated with our roles. This stress is known to negatively influence the ability of academics to maintain a good work/life balance (Enright et al., 2017; Hartung et al., 2017). This is particularly important for ECAs, as it can be challenging to balance the competing tensions between personal and academic life early on in one's career (Enright et al., 2017; Hartung et al., 2017). This tension was further exacerbated by the arrival of COVID-19 lock downs, as we were forced to merge our home and work spaces. As shown in the poems, this upheaval had a particularly significant impact on each of our personal lives:

Cameron

I had not had serious thoughts

about how this virus would impact my teaching

   let alone my planned April Wedding.

Josh

The Victorian Premier Announced:

   ‘if you can work from home, you must work from home’,

and

   ‘if you can learn from home, you must learn from home’

With these words,

we packed our laptops,

books, standing desks and monitors,

and set up shop at home.

Alex

We walk on the beach

I go for the odd paddle

we explore the reserve

with our 15-month-old daughter.

Small rays of sunshine lessen the pain.

Missing family

and friends

   under severe lockdowns of Melbourne.

These stanzas show the specific impact that COVID had on each of us. It caused stress and tension that we had to navigate with our families. Managing these personal issues was more difficult because of the change to our working environment. It made it challenging to disconnect from these issues while ‘at work’. Issues that were affecting our personal life bled over into our work life and vice-versa. For us, this feeling was heightened due to the restrictions imposed to address the ongoing crisis. The lengthy work-from-home order presented a challenge because there was very little ability to separate work from other spheres of our lives. We could not simply leave the office and head home to disconnect from work. This made our personal lives more stressful and set the stage for more stress and pressure in our work lives.

Professional

The poems show a clear sense of optimism from all of us heading into 2020. We took on leadership roles (as program coordinators), while trying to balance high teaching fractions (60% of allocated workloads) and research commitments (all of us at various stages of our PhD journeys). At this stage, we had already internalised and were embodying the pressure placed on ECAs to juggle multiple demands and expectations (Enright et al., 2017) and establish ourselves academically (Casey & Fletcher, 2017). Nevertheless, the experience that we had gained in previous years helped us to feel that we were well positioned to balance these requirements effectively. However, the rapid shift to online learning made navigating these roles more challenging. The shift meant that more of our already restricted workloads was spent on service and teaching to transition our subjects into fully online delivery. This was a difficult and time-consuming process, adding to the stress we felt from our roles as new program coordinators and active researchers. Moreover, there was an extra layer of difficulty for us as lecturers at a regional university, highlighted by the significant gap in access to resources for regional students, compared to their metropolitan counterparts (Nelson et al., 2017). COVID-19 intensified this situation, as many students in our courses struggled to gain access to reliable technology and internet access. This was particularly problematic during synchronous online classes and required significant tweaks to make content available for these students. For example, we had to deliver content synchronously for those students who could attend but make this content readily available and engaging for students who could only engage online, outside of class times. The ability to navigate these issues was particularly exacerbated by our positioning as HOPE educators.

The pandemic posed a particular challenge to education courses that have an experiential nature, such as HPE and OE, as highlighted in the following extracts:

Josh

Fast forward a week or two,

and it was time to deliver the intensive

that we were to do in NSW.

Instead of the early morning start in the bus to a far off land

it was a Teams call.

Where I welcomed the students and staff:

   “Welcome to what is likely to be by far

   the most bizarre week in your educational journey”

This started my first ever intensive at your place,

I was thinking of this as a temporary novelty.

I was wrong.

Cameron

As we limped on to week three,

with case numbers increasing,

the Premier gave a stay at home order

and insisted that all work,

if possible,

must occur from home, including education.

Significant change to my classes.

   Upheaval in the world of PE!

Staff confused. Unsure,

   how to include practical elements?

Teaching entirely online

a new challenge.

Alex

Learning about the world is experiential and social,

In physical and outdoor education

our classes are full of learning by doing.

Interacting with others, visiting places.

Educators challenged on multiply fronts,

How do we ‘do’ outdoor and physical education online?

Teachers, myself included, scrambled!

How to move to the online world?

PE has been traditionally labelled as a practical and ‘hands on’ subject in schools (Varea et al., 2020). In PE, the body plays a central role and the interaction between external bodies, as they assemble and reassemble, is key to practice (Smee et al., 2021). Outdoor education requires a similar approach and the ability to connect with place (Prins & Wattchow, 2020). The capacity to emphasise these elements of HPE and OE practice was challenging during the lockdown. Initially, we focused more on the theoretical elements of our courses, with efforts to engage the students through group activities conducted in break out rooms. Over time, we learned to adapt our normal practices and try to still emphasise these elements of practice while remaining physically distanced online. For Cameron this meant trying to deliver content online that still emphasised the body and the practical component of HPE, without resorting to an online fitness version of PE. For Josh and Alex, this meant delaying planned trips till the end of the year (in the hope that restrictions would be eased enough for the trips to go ahead) and trying to deliver more student-led outdoor opportunities, such as Josh’s ‘Camp At Your Place’ experience. Otherwise, this often meant trying to teach these practical activities online in a disembodied way, talking through them as an alternative, encouraging individual engagement outside class time or dropping them all together and finding alternatives. Whichever option we chose required hours of extra reading and planning. This posed a significant challenge for us as ECAs, one that added to the intensification of our personal and professional lives during COVID. Importantly though, despite the challenges, it also provided opportunities for us to develop as academics and HOPE educators. Engaging in this process of reflexivity through poetry, we came to see how this period of ‘distress’ offered significant opportunities for us to continue to learn and develop.

Opportunities

Affirming good pedagogy and supporting each other

As is often the case during challenging times, the few shining lights of our COVID experience was closely related to areas of difficulty. While we were stressed by factors that impacted our personal and professional lives, the COVID years still bought affirmation, insight and improved teaching and learning practices to our programs. Engaging in a process of reflexivity through poetic inquiry has been cathartic, because of the support we found in community. A sense of community, particularly during these difficult times, has played a crucial role in our development as ECAs, as we work towards becoming established academics and remaining effectively and positively engaged in our work. Community was experienced locally and personally in numerous ways. First, we were all lucky enough to have engaged with at least one mentorship group, such as our PhD supervisors and/or a few generous experienced staff whose patient advice, guidance and affirmation provided calm and perspective at critical times throughout the COVID-19 period. These mentors provided collegial support, helped us navigate the university system (Enright et al., 2017) and helped us to learn to develop our own coping mechanisms (McAlpine & Amundsen, 2018) during this turbulent period. Re-reading our poems this mentorship, although known by each ECA poet and (hopefully) individual mentors, is somewhat hidden in the poems. However, the shrewd reader will see the pivots and guiding hand of experienced academics in the background as we ECAs came to make sense of our own experience and made decisions accordingly. Take Alex for example, who with some help, came to realise that he has been caught in the administrative trap of the modern neo-liberal university:

Distracted by an avalanche of administration

documents for situations A – Z

a program review

changes to timetables

student consultation.

   I should have ignored the red tape.

Interestingly, our experience as ECAs has been consistent with the literature in the field. Bosanquet et al. (2017), among others, highlights these challenges but also notes that ‘ECAs are demonstrating agency by planning to avoid administrative and managerial work’ (p. 899). This certainly resonates with our experience, and we discussed this explicitly between ourselves and other colleagues. Indeed, it was the pressure of this administrative and managerial work as ECAs that resulted in the formation of our second important community group. Our micro community of three began meeting frequently as the COVID crisis intensified. These meetings quickly provided both the ‘social fabric for learning’ (Cox, 2013, p. 19) and emotional support to cope with difficult situations and constant change. The organisation of shared discussions and activities, such as the writing of the original narratives that form the basis of the poems above, resulted in the ‘development of trust and energy’ (Cox, 2013, p. 19) that not only helped us to pull through the navigate pressures of COVID but also build our capacity in several areas, particular in teaching and learning.

The combination of trust that developed as part of our group and the forced rapid shift online provided us with the opportunity to explore online learning and the teaching of experiential curricula without the usual fear of failure or unhelpful arguments surrounding whether or not online learning is a suitable approach (Dyment et al., 2018) for experiential curricula such as in the areas of HOPE. As highlighted in the previous section, the three of us wrestled with creating rich learning environments online under these new conditions, particularly in delivering practical content online. In analysing our poems, one point comes across very clearly – when deciding critical aspects of individual units, such as the mode it will run (face to face, online or blended), it should first and foremost, be a pedagogical decision, except for a crisis such as COVID! It came as no surprise to us, that our poems also present a professional opinion that there are concepts, skills and experiences that truly are best learned in a face-to-face environment and that cannot be replicated online. As warned by Dewey (1997), all those years ago, ‘there is no such thing as educational value in the abstract’ (p. 46). It is worth mentioning that we are not alone in reaching this conclusion when forced to teach experiential programs entirely online. Our experience resonates with those described by Dyment et al. (2018) and Smith et al. (2016) who were asked to teach an outdoor education program online. Experience(s) is crucial in providing students with ample opportunity to make sense of complex concepts and skills in engaging in authentic and meaningful ways in context. Consequently, COVID forced us and others (see for example Quay et al., 2020) to ask not only what the impact of the pandemic might be on experiential curricula but also what was possible? It shaped our thinking to consider all the elements of a post COVID-19 landscape to enable us to implement a new pedagogical perspective for a different class assemblage to teach common content.

Josh’s poem provides an insight into one of our successful online programs while we searched for what was possible in transitioning these experiential experiences to an online environment. ‘Camp At Your Place’ could never replace the rich embodied social experience of the outback fieldwork program we had planned, however, it could or rather should, replace traditional classroom style tutorials – as hinted to by Josh at the end of his poem. This online intensive fieldwork program showed what can be done. First, the program aimed to cater for students in isolation and under strict locked down rules, therefore the usual benefits of online learning such as opportunity, flexible access, low cost (time and money), elements of self-paced and self-interest learning and so on (see for example Downing et al., 2019) were targeted and achieved. Second, meaningful experiences, consumed and embodied, through a blend of synchronous and asynchronous activities aimed at exploring and coming to know their own (student’s) home. Josh notes in his poem that he believes that success was simply based on ‘Students’ doing rather than listing’. Dewey (1997), if he had attended, might also have complimented Josh on framing the experience so that it was both meaningful (their home) and purposeful (aimed at their immediate or future career) for the students who attended.

Engaging in this reflexive process, during COVID-19, helped us to realise that we have been underutilising online learning platforms and programs in our practice, particularly in the place of traditional tutorials. Which makes sense, since as ECAs we are trying to navigate multiple demands and expectations (Enright et al., 2017) and trying to develop our teaching and learning approach. Consequently, going forward, rather than think in terms of either-or, as warned by Dewey, we will approach our teaching in a more blended and pedagogically sound model that achieves the best of both approaches.

Conclusion

In this article, we add to the conversation about the difficulties and challenges faced by ECAs, as we found ourselves having to navigate many of the same expectations and demands (Enright et al., 2017). However, the onset of a global pandemic intensified many of these pressures. Our work is complex, stressful and constantly consumes too much of our personal lives. While sharing our experience through this reflexive poetic inquiry makes us somewhat vulnerable, our major concern is that the COVID pandemic has shone further light on how difficult and competitive ECA jobs are becoming, with the potential to get harder in a post-pandemic academic landscape, with a new focus on teaching practical content in online spaces. Importantly, this process also highlighted how we grew as educators. The challenges we faced during the COVID years helped us to take a significant step forward in our pedagogical understanding. We found ways to deliver some of our traditionally experiential HOPE curricula in an online environment, in a way that still helped our students achieve the learning outcomes. The collective process of engaging in shared reflection through poetic enquiry provided us with hope for the future. It provided the opportunity to engage reflexively in a collective reflection to build a shared experience that brought us through this turbulent time. Expressing ourselves through poetic inquiry helped to establish a strong bond between the three of us as HOPE ECAs that will stay with us. The process helped us to reflect and learn from this moment in time, to continue to grow and develop as academics and find new ways to navigate the ECA experience.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Cameron Van der Smee

Cameron Van der Smee is Health and Physical Education Lecturer in the Institute of Education, Arts and Community. His research interests are in the areas of primary health and physical education, embodiment, physical activity, play and playgrounds, and physical education teacher education.

Josh Ambrosy

Josh Ambrosy is a lecturer in the Institute of Education, Arts and Community at Federation University, Australia. Josh's research uses arts-based and poetic methodologies to explore issues around curriculum and policy in various settings. Josh teaches in both outdoor education and teacher education programs at Federation University.

Alex Prins

Alex Prins is a PhD researcher and Lecturer in Sport, Physical and Outdoor Education at Federation University Australia. His research interests are in the areas of enskilment, phenomenology, pedagogy, and coastal places.

Notes

1 These words brought on what has been widely described as the longest and one of the harshest lockdowns in the world, resulting in over 260 days of stringent lockdown measures in place. The length and severity of lockdowns had a tumultuous impact on academic work, particularly in practical teaching contexts

2 It is important to note that while PE and health are taught separately in most other countries, they are linked together and typically referred to as HPE. Accordingly, all health and physical education (HPE) content are covered in the HPE national curriculum. From a curricular perspective, outdoor education (OE) content falls into the HPE curriculum.