Teaching under lockdown: the change in the social practice of teaching.

Due to the unprecedented situation caused by a global pandemic, the traditional way of teaching that is reliant on face-to-face interaction between teachers and students has been dismantled. This article looks into university teachers' experiences of teaching under lockdown, with an intention to understand what the change meant in terms of social practice. The research follows a qualitative design, in which ten university teachers were interviewed using a semi-structured interview guide. Three themes interwoven with a common thread were identified through teachers' reflections, including displacement, routine, and role. The common thread was identified as the interaction between teachers and students, and analysing the quality of this interaction led to understanding the social kernel of teaching as embedded in social practice, suggesting that physical dislocation demands teachers to recreate meaning in the new situation. This change has been seen as difficult, yet unpacking teachers' perceptions provided valuable lessons for the future.

Social orienting of children with autism to facial expressions and speech: a study with a wearable eye-tracker in naturalistic settings.

This study investigates attention orienting to social stimuli in children with Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) during dyadic social interactions taking place in real-life settings. We study the effect of social cues that differ in complexity and distinguish between social cues produced by facial expressions of emotion and those produced during speech. We record the children's gazes using a head-mounted eye-tracking device and report on a detailed and quantitative analysis of the motion of the gaze in response to the social cues. The study encompasses a group of children with ASC from 2 to 11-years old (n = 14) and a group of typically developing (TD) children (n = 17) between 3 and 6-years old. While the two groups orient overtly to facial expressions, children with ASC do so to a lesser extent. Children with ASC differ importantly from TD children in the way they respond to speech cues, displaying little overt shifting of attention to speaking faces. When children with ASC orient to facial expressions, they show reaction times and first fixation lengths similar to those presented by TD children. However, children with ASC orient to speaking faces slower than TD children. These results support the hypothesis that individuals affected by ASC have difficulties processing complex social sounds and detecting intermodal correspondence between facial and vocal information. It also corroborates evidence that people with ASC show reduced overt attention toward social stimuli.