Dislocated teaching

This article presents the ethnography of a university course delivered as a co-modality in the context of the coronavirus pandemic in French-speaking Switzerland. It sheds light on the changes that this context has brought about in the relational configurations and interaction modalities that usually allow for’classroom teaching’ in an institutionalized setting. To this end, the various material and technical devices observed, as well as their frameworks of participation, are described in detail. The analysis shows the effects of these devices on the presence of bodies, their perception, and the pooling of their attention, which allows us to examine the multiple collective forms taken by the class through different configurations. Starting from an approach to socio-technical mediations which considers that any situation is’dislocated’, that is, traversed by exogenous elements flowing through and over it, the article shows that certain dislocations do not allow the transformation of university teaching into a common and truly educational experience. The challenge of dislocated teaching is therefore to ensure that physically separated students have access to the essential communication and participation without which dislocation would only mean a fragmented and scattered form of teaching in terms of collective experience.