Naini Arora, faculty at Srishti-Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru and an external Ph.D student working with  Prof. Venkatesh Choppella presented her research work on Mediated learning spaces: fragmented personas at an International Conference Pandemic Pedagogies in Language Education  (PPLE-2021) held from 28 – 30 October 2021 at Christ University, Bangalore in collaboration with Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi, and Dhofar University, Oman. The other authors of this paper are Bharath Murthy and Tapasya Thapa who are also faculty at Srishti-Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, Bengaluru.

Research work as explained by the authors:

Our presentation embeds languages of mediation and the entangled spaces of fragmented experience, amnesia and microscopic ephemeralities within the context of a paradigmatic shift in the methods of teaching. We pivot our presentation on student led collaborative online curated outcomes as sites of pedagogic inquiries into the nature of online facilitation, emergent anxieties of a tech mediated world, online presence as spectres and shadows, learning entanglements within such a premise. 

We extend these inquiries to expand notions of learner self, learner personas and learner representations in the online space; and the form and site of the photograph- both as a pivotal mode of documentation and as a demonstration of learning. The presentation further intends to unpack the hesitations of built personas when encountering online teaching platforms that mirror the design and architecture of social media interfaces.   

In such scenarios, where and how do we situate knowledge dissemination? As facilitators, how are we navigating different aspects of mediation, whilst we ourselves represent mediated selves? How does one reconcile the performativities of pedagogy to the performance of online facilitation?    

Conference page: https://sites.google.com/conference.christuniversity.in/pple-2021/home