Reimagining teacher identity in the post-Covid-19 university: becoming digitally savvy, reflective in practice, collaborative, and relational (original) (raw)

‘Kindness and empathy beyond all else’: Challenges to professional identities of Higher Education teachers during COVID-19 times

The Australian Educational Researcher

COVID-19 has continued to effect higher education globally in significant ways. During 2020, many institutions shifted learning online overnight as the sector closed its doors and opened new sites for remote teaching. This article reports on an international study [Phillips et al., 2021] that sought to capture how cross-sectoral teachers experienced these emergency changes during the first months of restrictions. The data, analysed using narrative identity theory, revealed concerns that fall into two broad categories: technologies and relationships. Significantly, it was not a loss of content delivery or changes to assessment that prompted the greatest anxiety for our colleagues, but that they held significant concerns about their students’ mental health; inequities of access to a range of services including technological; and challenges connecting emotionally with their students at a distance. The results provide actionable strategies for higher education institutions to apply in f...

Surviving but not thriving: Comparing primary, vocational and higher education teachers' experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown

Education and Information Technologies, 2021

In this paper we examine the impacts of the global pandemic in 2020 on different levels of education system, particularly looking at the changes in teaching practice. The health emergency caused closure of schools, and online distance education became a temporary solution, creating discomfort for many teachers for whom this was the first time engaged with online education. In our research we investigated two important dimensions, namely, how technology was used and what the newfound distance meant in terms of the teacher-student relationship. The article offers insights into experiences of teaching from lockdown reported by 41 teachers at primary, vocational and higher education level in the region of Vaud, Switzerland. This comparative qualitative research has provided an opportunity for an in-depth analysis of the main similarities and differences at three distinctly different educational levels and a possibility to learn more about common coping practices in teaching. The study gives a contribution to a lack of comparative studies of teacher experiences at different educational levels. Results show two dimensions in handling the lockdown crisis: mastering the digital tools and the importance of student-teacher interaction. Whilst the interviewed teachers largely overcame the challenges of mastering digital tools, optimizing the quality interaction and ensuring the transactional presence online remained a problem. This indicates the importance of the social aspect in education at all levels, and implies that teacher support needs to expand beyond technical pedagogical knowledge of online distance education.

What Really Matters: Experiences of Emergency Remote Teaching in University Teaching and Learning During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Frontiers in Education, 2021

The COVID-19 pandemic and related lock downs have accelerated the need for online and remote teaching within university settings. However, due to the abrupt nature of the pandemic, many academic staff were not prepared for this forced transition. This study aimed to understand how the pandemic affected academics at a New Zealand university, with regards to their transition to emergency remote teaching. Specifically, it explores the challenges as well as benefits academics experienced during this transition. Recommendations for future online learning are also made. Academic staff (N = 67) at a New Zealand University completed an anonymous online survey. Quantitative data were analyzed statistically using descriptive and inferential statistics, while qualitative data were analyzed thematically. Major challenges experienced included miscommunication from the university, concerns about student access to technology, finding a quiet space to work, lack of digital competence skills, too mu...

Moving Teaching Online: Cultural Barriers Experienced by University Teachers During Covid-19

Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2021

This empirical study examines the experiences of academics and professional service staff in a large UK university during first weeks of the transition to online teaching and working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic. The method draws on the work by Gourlay and Oliver (2018) to explore engagement with the digital university in everyday practice. Using data from 412 survey responses and 32 interviews, the study traces varying ways staff characterised themselves during the first months of lockdown in the UK (from March to July, 2020). The findings highlight that university support services underwent a metamorphosis to support the transition to online teaching. However, insufficient attention was paid to the 'identity crisis' and threats perceived by academics who were used to teaching students on campus. Academics tended to focus on transferring traditional teaching practices to the online environment, rather than on changing teaching practice, leaving face-to-face teaching as the default point of reference. These cultural barriers are a persistent obstacle to a more productive engagement with digitalisation. Transitioning to online teaching involves continuing existing work while also learning new practices. Such efforts were challenging for teaching staff who did not have dedicated space at home to work and those with caring responsibilities. This, combined with gendered patterns around caring and the extra support needed by students during the crisis, added emotional labour to already-full workloads. We recommend that intersecting forms of disadvantage be acknowledged, supported and rewarded for universities to create sustainable and just futures.

‘One doesn’t just move online’: an intersectional analysis of teachers’ response to the crisis of pandemic teaching

Teachers and Teaching, 2023

While the educational emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic centred on student learning and safety, teachers’ burnout, and teacher strikes, stories of teachers quitting the profession have left schools in crisis around the world. In this study, we use an intersectional approach to explore teacher experiences during the pandemic as ‘crisis experiences.’ The data presented in this study were obtained from an exploratory survey which recruited practicing PreK-12 and higher education teachers (n = 134) from 22 countries. The survey included closed- and open-ended questions related to teachers’ experiences teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. One-sample chi-square tests showed that quantitative variables of gender, previous experience teaching and learning online, and grade-level taught were significantly related to teacher anxiety. A descriptive approach to qualitative analysis identified three axes of the crisis which affected teachers’ experiences: teaching environment, teaching relationships, and systemic support. Findings show teachers had no choice or adequate time to prepare to transition online, increasing anxiety especially among women, those teaching younger grades, and those without experience teaching or learning online. Teachers’ work during the pandemic should be understood as ‘emergency remote teaching’ which has put teachers at greater risk for burnout and departure from the profession.

Online University Teaching During and After the Covid-19 Crisis: Refocusing Teacher Presence and Learning Activity

Postdigital Science and Education

The Covid-19 pandemic has raised significant challenges for the higher education community worldwide. A particular challenge has been the urgent and unexpected request for previously face-to-face university courses to be taught online. Online teaching and learning imply a certain pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), mainly related to designing and organising for better learning experiences and creating distinctive learning environments, with the help of digital technologies. With this article, we provide some expert insights into this online-learning-related PCK, with the goal of helping non-expert university teachers (i.e. those who have little experience with online learning) to navigate in these challenging times. Our findings point at the design of learning activities with certain characteristics, the combination of three types of presence (social, cognitive and facilitatory) and the need for adapting assessment to the new learning requirements. We end with a reflection on how responding to a crisis (as best we can) may precipitate enhanced teaching and learning practices in the postdigital era.

Emergency Remote Education (ERE) Due to COVID-19 Pandemic: Teachers’ Perceptions on the Roles They Were Asked To Play

Research Journal of Education, 2022

The suspension of the educational process imposed in all educational levels in many countries due to the rapid spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, together with the need for access to safe teaching, imposed an emergency and massive turn towards online education. This new condition came as a surprise to teachers, who were obliged to use new technologies for the design and the implementation of their teaching, as well as for the communication with and support to their students, changing thus not only the manner of teaching and learning but also the roles they were asked to respond to. The present paper, using semi-structured interview as a tool, studies the views of ten Greek teachers of primary education regarding their role in remote education in the emergency caused by this pandemic, the skills that helped them respond to these roles, the obstacles but also the assistance they encountered in their efforts. The research findings demonstrate that the teachers, with their patience and th...

From impossibility to necessity: Reflections on moving to emergency remote university teaching during COVID-19

2021

This chapter is an autoethnographic retrospective reflection on three university-level Information Systems courses transitioning from face-to-face teaching to online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. This retrospective reflection contributes to the research and teaching of courses that require: 1) increasing student engagement through new methods such as gamification of learning tasks, 2) face-to-face tutoring and supervision sessions, and 3) laboratory work done by groups of students, with hands-on work with a master-apprentice approach, and with external customers. Furthermore, the chapter compares the experiences of adapting these courses to the emergency remote-teaching mode with the ongoing course digitalization and online teaching work done over the past two decades. Finally, it touches upon issues of empowerment and equality in emergency remote teaching and discusses implications for research and practice.

Locked in and locked out: Covid-19 and teaching “remotely”

PROSPECTS

Covid-19 has rendered education "remote", opening a chasm in space and time between teachers and students, between how teaching and learning was practiced before and how it is practiced now and for the foreseeable, uncertain future. As many educators find themselves both locked in and locked out, this article seeks to sort through the implications of this remoteness. The article builds on the work of William F. Pinar and George Grant, to argue that technology is an ontology shaping how we encounter who we are and the world in which we live. Caught within the tightening circle of a Covid-19 environment predicated on keeping our distance from one another, while we are connecting technologically, at risk is the complicated conversation, as well as attunement, that lie at the heart of teaching, even as teachers know that it is only through improvisational variations on these that one can hope to chart an ethical course forward.

From bricks and mortar to remote teaching: a teacher education programme‘s response to COVID-19

Journal of Education for Teaching

The spread of COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe with incendiary events that transformed not only economies and health, but also education at all levels, in all nations, and to all people. The effects on primary, secondary, and higher education were swift, leaving higher education institutions to fend for themselves. In the United States, the delivery of knowledge in a traditional classroom setting changed to exclusively online teaching overnight. This article presents how one California liberal arts college and its graduate teacher education programme prepared its faculty for this significant transition for a different educational setting and teaching methodologies in response to COVID-19. Faculty were resilient to the changes in teaching delivery models of remote/online education that were imminent. The data yielded five themes: Technology-Based Instructional Strategies; Technology-Based Support Office Consultation; Alternative Technology-Based Course Assessments; Feedback for Learning and Teaching Improvement; and Social-Emotional Engagement in Courses, and Support of Clinical Placement that were found to be essential to transitioning to remote/online teaching.