Exploring hybrid teaching through a lens of choreography
Speakers: James Lamb, Joe Noteboom, Jen Ross
When: 24 Nov 2025, 12:00 - 13:30 GMT
Where: online (Teams) and in person in the Edinburgh Futures Institute, room 1.55
Abstract:
This seminar explores approaches to hybrid education, where teaching simultaneously happens online and within a physical classroom. While all teaching involves entanglements of social and material elements (including people, objects, spaces and infrastructure) hybrid education poses additional challenges through the need to work across, and fuse together, different modes. Drawing on their recent publication on this topic and reflecting on further examples from course design and teaching practice, the speakers will argue that perspectives from the field of dance choreography can enable us to work with the complexity of hybrid teaching and suggest that sucessful hybrid teaching can emerge through rehearsal, patterns of movement, imposed constraints and improvisation.
The talk will also demonstrate the productive value of mistakes within hybrid teaching, and reflect on the structures and resources required to support hybrid teaching at scale. It will be of interest to teachers, learning designers, technologists, and those with a critical or practices interest in learning spaces and hybrid education.
Bios:
Dr James Lamb is a lecturer within the Centre for Research and Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh. He teaches and researches around learning spaces, learning futures, postdigital education, and the use of sound in education research. He is co-editor of the Postdigital Science and Education book series, a co-author of the Manifesto for Teaching Online (2020), and runs the Elektronisches Lernen Muzik project, where the relationship between music and learning is explored through playlists.
Dr Joe Noteboom is a Senior Learning Technology and Design Advisor at the Edinburgh Futures Institute, where he supports the design and teaching of EFI’s undergraduate and postgraduate courses and the governance of educational technology. He recently completed a PhD in Sociology as part of the University of Edinburgh’s centres for Research in Digital Education and Technomoral Futures, which explored students’ experiences of datafication at university and in their everyday lives.
Professor Jen Ross is co-director of the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh, and founder of the MSc in Education Futures at the Edinburgh Futures Institute. Her research explores how digital technologies affect ideas, practice, and visions of the future in higher education and in the cultural heritage sector, interrogating the way these shape and are shaped by issues of power, audience, surveillance, trust and openness.
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