Abstract
The COVID-19 crisis is impacting global society in a nearly unprecedented manner. One fractured experience is the 2019/2020 school experience. This calls attention to the impact on students' identity, agency, and sense of place within the world. This search requires exploring the impact rhetoric and sociolinguistics have in and outside of the classroom. Programs utilizing digital tools advance students' identities, honor agency, and understand changes in the world. Allowing students a space to express their experiences, as well as see their peers in various global destinations, begins reflections on how social environments are impacting students. Incorporating conscientious uses of rhetoric and sociolinguistics within one's classroom encourages three learning outcomes for students: 1) it establishes student agency, 2) it helps define and explore the concept of global citizenship, and 3) it encourages students to develop transferable critical thinking skills particularly.
TopThe Purpose Of The Study
This chapter investigates incorporating rhetoric and sociolinguistics, whether it be in-person or digital environments, to establish student agency, define and explore the concept of global citizenship, and encourage students to develop transferrable critical thinking skills. Therefore, this work seeks to define and explore student agency facilitated by educators and as a self-work process during times of social distancing and online learning. Additionally, it explores how notions of global awareness have been or can be influenced in times of crises, especially through virtual learning processes of the COVID-19 crisis. Finally, it strives to acknowledge techniques that redirect curricular goals and learning activities to incorporate outcomes, explicitly or implicitly, addressing circumstances rising from the COVID crisis or other disruptive crises. This work aims to uncover useful practices through theoretical and experiential works for educators to consider as they create learning environments where students can thrive individually, collaboratively, emotionally, and academically throughout turbulent events.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Online Pedagogy: Best practices for teaching online as well as how to foster best learning in online environments.
Critical discourse analysis: The study of the connection between power, language, and social constructs.
Global Citizenship: The idea that, although we have a multitude of manners of defining ourselves, the overarching identity that should be prioritized is a global citizenship. All identities and geographies are connected.
Online Environment: The alternative learning space created by educators and students using digital tools and virtual class sessions due to the shelter-in-place, quarantines, and stay-at-home orders.
Coping Mechanisms: Strategies used to mitigate stressful situations. In regards to this study, these activities assist in making workloads and out of the classroom circumstances more manageable.
Collaborative Learning: Learning achieved through pedagogical strategies that prioritize student participation and creation in establishing learning environments, assignments, and discussion areas.
Student Agency: The way students relate and interpret to their world, particularly how empowered students feel regarding their identity, control over situations, and ability to create the perception of themselves as well as the world around them.