AustLit

'During my first semester of online teaching in 2020 I began keeping a form of teaching archive that was new to me.1 In addition to the usual lectures and slides, I began to accumulate a number of files with a .txt suffix. This is an archive of one of the unexpected affordances of teaching over Zoom: the chat window. I did not know what to do with the chat window, but my students did. They asked questions. They made jokes. They developed extended comedic and often critical conversations about the texts we were reading and how I was teaching them. These chat.txt files are an archive of students seeking and finding social connection in an online English classroom during a pandemic. They are also important to me as a record of a semester in which I tried to use that online classroom to begin to rethink what it means to do the work that has been the focus of my career: teaching and researching Australian literature.' (Introduction)