Balancing Privacy & Presence in Post-Covid Pedagogy: A TPC Study

Abstract

Covid-19 forced Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) classes online and created pressure for more personal interaction to combat isolation. Faculty sought new approaches to teaching and learning for digital spaces and institutions called for increasing presence in recorded environments. These changes created a need to balance data privacy with human presence in our classes and elicited this study. This research shares TPC faculty experiences teaching during the pandemic. It addresses the difficulty of teaching, supporting privacy, and creating presence in the captured classroom. Through interviews with faculty, I offer what their experiences have been like and how their pedagogy has changed. I marry contemporary privacy and presence scholarship with their experiences to develop a heuristic and to recommend practices for educators that can help support data privacy and nurture the right kind of presence for today’s surveilled classrooms.