COVID-19 and the digitalization of higher education – resourcefulness and teachers’ practical thinking

Lockdowns and transformations of teaching into online formats have challenged teaching and learning in higher education in the Spring and Autumn of 2020. For teachers, reorganizations of pedagogy into digital formats have to some extent been an emergency measure to ensure continuity and quality in teaching. Thus, teachers have drawn on their professional knowledge and experience, but have also learned from provisional designs, improvisations, observations and developments of practice. The question is therefore how we can identify ways in which teachers learn from engaging in online teaching practices and how this can become a resource in developing the digitalization of learning in higher education. In discussing these issues I am proposing that we focus on teachers’ practical thinking as an aspect of their engagement in practice. I use the concept bricolage to understand ways in which practical thinking operates as a form of tinkering and situated problem solving in teaching. Bricolage originates from Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind (1966), and has been used in research on eg technology in education (Sørensen 2009, Kress 2010, Turkle & Papert 1990). In The Savage Mind, Lévi-Strauss develops the idea of bricolage by contrasting the approaches of the bricoleur with that of the engineer. The purpose of this argument is to identify aspects of what Lévi-Strauss calls the science of the concrete, a kind of practical thinking that he associates with the bricoleur. The engineer is thus a builder who engages in the world through conceptual and abstract thinking. In comparison, the bricoleur is a tinkerer, who uses whatever tools he has in his treasury to solve the task at hand. As a tinkerer, the bricoleur performs within the constraints of availability and proximity, and therefore reorganizes and reappropriates his inventory for use rather than (re)conceptualizes it. In this sense the bricoleur is resourceful but also grounded, as his heterogeneous treasury of available tools define his approach to building and problem solving, rather than the intellectual abstractions of the engineer. Therefore, his means may seem limited, but technically his resourcefulness is sophisticated and rich. Following this, bricolage can be understood in the context of teaching both as a creativity that crafts solutions ‘out of nothing’ (Baker & Nelson 2005), and as an ad-hocism with a conservative approach to production and problem solving (Hatton 1988). I shall discuss these different interpretations of teachers’ practical thinking and relate them to the practice of teaching in digitalized classrooms in and after the Covid-19 lockdown.