“That was a pretty serious jump”: Feelings of ambivalence and complexity of arts-based educators in online environments

Arts-based methods which traditionally rely on engagement with material artefacts (e.g. LEGO® bricks, finger puppets, craft materials) have been on the rise in management learning and teaching. However, COVID-19 has challenged educators to adapt these methods to online teaching environments with an impact on learning development. This blog post reports on the results of a piece of qualitative research that sought to deepen our understanding of the pedagogy of arts-methods with an aim to explore the effective transferability to online teaching environments. Drawing on participant observation of six teaching sessions, which employed arts-based teaching online, and 13 story-elicitation interviews conducted with the educators in these sessions, this paper explores the lived experience of art-based teaching in the virtual world of teaching and learning. The analysis indicated that the technical limitations and the physical separation posed challenges in terms of transference of activities to virtual setting, inability to “read the room” caused by the lack of micro-social interactions in these settings. These limitations got in the way of the “embodied” experience of learning which has implications for learner development. The blog post concludes by surfacing questions and reflections into the future of arts-based methods for virtual world of learning development