PhoneMe in COVID Online Teacher Education; Implementing the PhoneMe Project in an Online Cross-Curriculum

COVID-19 Research Area(s): Social Impacts

This rapid response study investigates students' response to, and potential use of, a curriculum innovation that has been integrated into a multi-section, cross curriculum course for Secondary Teacher Candidates in the UBC Teacher Education Program. This innovation is called the PhoneMe, a project of the Digital Literacy Centre, creates an online educational venue for place-based spoken word poetry. This open access public platform, with its interactive map of published and voice recorded poems, has been active for three years and provides teachers with ready-made teaching materials that are ideal for teaching online during times of social distancing owing the the COVID-19 crisis, as it creates a sense of social connection, intimacy and connection to place that is otherwise absent during times of social distancing and travel restriction. The goal of this study is to understand how teachers can facilitate, through the experience of reading, listening and interacting with experiential poetic accounts of different localized experiences, a sense of social connection and valuing of place-based knowledge relevant to their teachable subject areas.