Abeer Ali Okaz

Long before the dramatic impact of Covid-19, Abeer had already been advocating for the integration of ICT tools and more traditional teaching approaches, moving towards blended forms of teaching and learning. As she puts it, “Technology supports differentiation” (source), as it can engender different expressive channels for students, through tools such as blogs or forums. It also allows for self-paced learning, thereby encouraging independence and autonomy for the student, who is given a degree of control in the pedagogic process.

Abeer feels that the use of ICT resources such as Padlet tends to motivate students and stimulate high levels of interaction, thus generating more collaboration and the consequent development of higher-level thinking skills. She recognises that students already use online platforms and resources outside the classroom and that this has significantly impacted on how they communicate, interact and learn in their everyday lives. In her view, teaching should adjust to these changes in students’ communication choices, relational modes, attention span and memory retention dynamics.

Acknowledging the challenges this might pose for teachers, in her talk, A Journey Through Time (2021), Abeer outlined how staff at Pharos University had to quickly adapt their practice at the start of the pandemic, reassessing teaching systems and training programmes. As she describes, the confidence gap in the use of technology among staff became a platform for collaboration and idea-sharing among teachers and administrative staff alike, thus generating the kind of engaged collective learning that is encouraged in language teaching. These dynamics simultaneously encouraged staff to become more responsible for their own learning and training, recalling the empowered learning processes fostered in humanistic teaching. For Abeer, the conscientious use of ICT tools therefore has much to offer in any language teaching approach that promotes self-determination, self-motivation and collaborative learning, and she believes that technology, in its blended form, is “here to stay”.