ABSTRACT
As uncertainty about university reopening turned into anxiety about managing, teaching, and learning in the era of COVID-19, teachers had to scramble to reconfigure courses to accommodate new modes of managing classes and students had to cope with learning at a distance. This has been particularly challenging for media schools that offer programs that emphasize skills training, from reporting and writing to audiovisual and multimedia production. Experiential learning is crucial in such programs, and teachers build in opportunities for such engagement in the classroom as students learn from hands-on training with equipment and collaboration with peers. In India, when schools reopened in August 2020 after the government-imposed lockdown, with online classes, it was clear that teaching and learning would have to be re-thought, and experienced anew. Given the diversity of the student body, the relative unfamiliarity of faculty with online teaching, and the perceived impossibility of acquiring practical skills without access to physical infrastructure, how are teachers thinking about how they build newsroom competencies in this changed scenario, and how are students experiencing it? This paper describes the case of a media studies department in India, where teachers and students discovered possibilities of engagement and learning while navigating a new pedagogy of care.
