Shared Intentionality in Hyflex Education: Understanding Engagement, Interaction and Inclusion through Lived Experiences of Diverse Instructors and Students

Inclusive education usually focuses on including a diverse range of students while neglecting to focus on an equally important stakeholder: instructors with disabilities. Additionally, instructors with disabilities are rarely represented in inclusive education research. This longitudinal participatory study documents diverse instructors’ lived experiences in remote and hyflex education, during, transitioning and “after” the Covid-19 pandemic. Hyflex education provides the flexibility to choose between virtual or face-to-face experiences or remote and collated interactions. This approach grew during the transition out of the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown to harness positive affordances of different modalities to increase inclusivity and accessibility. Current practices and three models of hyflex execution are documented in this report. Hyflex interaction comes with challenges communicating, coordinating and collaborating across environments. Codesigned interventions addressing these challenges are presented in this report. The effectiveness of coordination and collaboration can be understood through Tomesello’s concept of shared intentionality, which is when people have joint attention and intention during interactions. A developed model mapping shared intentionality, through (inter)action and information flow in hyflex environments, is presented. The implications of an abundance or scarcity of information and action within this model is discussed as (the coined term) shared intentionality black holes. Shared intentionality black holes refer to the complete inability to foster shared intentionality, thereby inhibiting effective interaction in hyflex environments

Fostering shared intentionality for diverse learners through cross-sensory interaction design

As the theme of this year’s conference suggests, cognitive diversity among learners and educators is increasingly acknowledged. However, in our societies that increasingly require advanced education, training, and technical skills, the pressure to standardize learning objectives, delivery techniques and delivery tools, especially online, is high. In these situations, learners and educators of diverse cognitive phenotypes and abilities experience learning environments that are a poor match for their abilities, making effective delivery of educational content challenging. In addition to learning about our work developing cross-sensory interaction design principles, workshop participants will share lived experiences of the pandemic-induced experimentation in online learning over the past two years to co-design prototypes that address pain points identified by participants