The shift to online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a learning experience for educators. While online learning is not new, the sudden loss of familiar cues has highlighted challenges for learners and teachers. This paper focuses on the significance of language in virtual classrooms in an Australian university in the narrative accounts elicited from five educators. The analysis drew on notions of activity types (Levinson, 1979), the dramaturgic self (Goffman, 1959), and learning as a reciprocal, meaning-making, and interpretive process (Scarino, 2014). The findings demonstrate that the participants responded to the challenges and possibilities they encountered by developing ways of rethinking self, presence, and participation in interaction with learners. We argue that this process involves an intercultural orientation to teaching and learning in online settings that is key to reflective practice, relationships of trust and shared understandings in teaching, learning, and knowing, well beyond the pandemic.