Choreography and improvisation in hybrid teaching (article)

In this new (open access) article in Higher Education Research and Development, I have written about my experiences of hybrid teaching (or ‘fusion’, as we call it locally within Edinburgh Futures Institute, where I teach on the MSc in Education Futures).
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The main thrust of the article, co-authored with Joe Noteboom, Tim Fawns and Jen Ross, is that we can better conceptualise and confront the complexity of hybrid teaching by turning towards thinking and practice from dance choreography. This includes ideas around rules, rehearsal, patterns of movement, and embracing the possibilities of accidents.

Improvising an approach to hybrid presentations, where each group comprises in-room and online students (and the audience is similarly present in-room and online. This photo is from my hybrid course, The Future of Learning Organisations. September 2023.

Not every aspect of dance choreography maps neatly onto hybrid teaching. Where writing around dance tends to put human interest centre-stage, we instead position hybrid teaching as emerging from an entanglement of human and non-human elements (including, but not limited to, space, technology, pedagogy and people). Meanwhile, we see students as persons that we work with, rather than perform before. Nevertheless, by reflecting back on examples of our teaching from the MSc in Education Futures, we see important ways that hybrid teaching and dance choreography are productively in-synch.