Keele Research Repository

The COVID-19 pandemic radically transformed higher education, which required many educators and students to adapt their learning and teaching practices in a short space of time. The emergency transition to online teaching during the pandemic created many learning opportunities by encouraging educators to rethink pedagogical practices, but also posed challenges and widened inequalities in education and society. In this article, I use critical pedagogies to reflect on my experiences of facilitating collaborative reading activities in a fully online environment during the pandemic, using a first-year core module in English Literature as my case study. I discuss the opportunities and challenges that emerged from the emergency transition to online teaching and learning, paying attention to issues of accessibility and inclusion. I advocate for the collaborative annotation tool Talis Elevate as a method of promoting critical pedagogies that empower students to engage in ‘deep reading’ and critical discussions surrounding inequalities in literature and wider society. I conclude by arguing that Talis Elevate, when combined with critical pedagogies, creates democratic and critically engaged learning communities by enabling students to find their voices and co-create knowledge about the subject matter.