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Shifting Skins: Becoming Multiple During Emergency Online Teaching, Bianca Licata, Catherine Cheng Stahl

Occasional Paper Series

In this essay, we reflect on the emergence of our (new) teacher identities from the phenomenal space created within online learning, following the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. Thrust from classrooms into in-between spaces mediated by digital technologies, the capricious co-inhabited new learning space functioned as a becoming-other space of identity-play, surfacing from centrifugal intra-actions among human, non-human, and inorganic entities and energies—what we have named a thinning space (authors, forthcoming). It called for becoming shapeshifters together through resisting crystallized roles and (re)claiming a multiplicity of vulnerable thin skins. We draw from the possibilities of existing virtual gaming spaces to …