Senior Project Advisor

Judith Pine

Document Type

Project

Publication Date

Winter 2024

Keywords

Learning Modalities, Academic-Institutional Nostalgia, Accessibility, Folk Knowledge, Educational Barriers, Cheating, Higher Education, COVID-19

Abstract

Following the pandemic-induced shift in educational modalities from in-person to online, the calls for a return to “normalcy” or in-person learning guided institutional policy making and culture more broadly. This study is an initial step towards tracking and interrogating this shift and the artifacts brought into view at Western Washington University. A quantitative survey and two rounds of qualitative focus groups and interviews were performed in order to assess student perspectives on this transition or 'return' to in-person learning. The resulting code, FIRBO, calls attention to Folk Knowledge, Interaction, Resources, Barriers, and Openness. These themes highlight and interact with a pervasive sense of academic-institutional nostalgia which underscores the student response to the transition. This nostalgia invokes pre-pandemic and pandemic era features to envision a higher education which is characteristic of the times before the pandemic while also integrating the accessibility of the hybrid and online classroom. In addition to this centralized academic-institutional nostalgia, dilemmas were located which center on Economic Logics, Cheating, Rest and Accessibility, as well as Unknown and Known Unknowns.

(Survey data is included in a separate attachment on this page.)

Department

Anthropology

Type

Text

Rights

Copying of this document in whole or in part is allowable only for scholarly purposes. It is understood, however, that any copying or publication of this document for commercial purposes, or for financial gain, shall not be allowed without the author’s written permission.

Language

English

Format

application/pdf

Additional Files
Tulloch capstone survey data.xlsx (33 kB)
Survey data
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