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The Shaping Influence of the COVID-19 Crisis on a Teacher Educator’s Online Identity: A Pandemic/Post-Pandemic Self-Study
Abstract
The inquiry discussed in this chapter reports on the experiences of a teacher educator during the COVID-19 pandemic. The chapter investigates how the pandemic shaped the teacher educator’s identity and pedagogical practice. The work is conceptually grounded in Deleuzo-Guattarian concepts. Methodologically the inquiry is a self-study in that it is self-initiated and aimed at improving professional practice. The results of this research focused on three emergent themes in relation to teacher educator identity: (a) the displacement of the body and the centering of the discursive; (b) the diminishment of pedagogical certainty and the expansion of pedagogical negotiation; and (c) the persistence of emotional fatigue and the requisite for self-care. This work contributes to the scholarly literature and provides an example of professional practice to support teacher educators in fully enacting a professional identity that aligns with their values and promotes their students’ success. Recommendations for research and teaching are provided.
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The purpose of this study was to explore how returning to teaching during the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic impacted teachers’ stress and anxiety. Specifically, the study investigated how teachers’ anxiety changed during the first month of school. Additionally, the study explored the association of teachers’ stress and anxiety and predictor variables for changes in teacher anxiety while teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. The present study included 329 elementary teachers from across the United States who completed a survey during the first week of October 2020. The results found that most teachers saw no change or an increase in anxiety during the first month. Significant predictors of increased teacher anxiety included stress and communication within the school, with virtual instruction teachers having the most increase in anxiety. In comparison, the no change in anxiety group included significant predictors of stress, virtual instruction, and communication within the school. The present study provides applicable information to schools and districts as there is limited empirical research on the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on teachers. Teachers are working as frontline workers during the pandemic; thus, schools and districts need to monitor teacher stress and anxiety during the COVID-19 pandemic and provide the necessary support.
The COVID-19 viral pandemic affected all facets of life, including schooling. In March 2020, schools abruptly ended face-to-face instruction and transitioned to emergency remote instruction. David Marshall, David Shannon, and Savanna Love surveyed teachers nationally between mid-March and early April 2020 to understand their experiences during this time. Teachers found all aspects of teaching more challenging during remote instruction and shared a range of experiences related to training opportunities, barriers to student learning, as well as support for English learners and students with special needs. Based on the teachers’ comments, the authors recommend incorporating digital learning days in future school calendars and putting clear plans in place for future emergencies.
The whole educational system from elementary to tertiary level has been collapsed during the lockdown period of the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) not only in India but across the globe. This study is a portrayal of online teaching-learning modes adopted by the Mizoram University for the teaching-learning process and subsequent semester examinations. It looks forward to an intellectually enriched opportunity for further future academic decision-making during any adversity. The intended purpose of this paper seeks to address the required essentialities of online teaching-learning in education amid the COVID-19 pandemic and how can existing resources of educational institutions effectively transform formal education into online education with the help of virtual classes and other pivotal online tools in this continually shifting educational landscape. The paper employs both quantitative and qualitative approach to study the perceptions of teachers and students on online teaching-learning modes and also highlighted the implementation process of online teaching-learning modes. The value of this paper is to draw a holistic picture of ongoing online teaching-learning activities during the lockdown period including establishing the linkage between change management process and online teaching-learning process in education system amid the COVID-19 outbreak so as to overcome the persisting academic disturbance and consequently ensure the resumption of educational activities and discourses as a normal course of procedure in the education system.
This chapter decenters the methodological unfolding of a qualitative research study on mainstream teachers of English learners, shifting from a sociocultural emphasis on individuality and agency towards affect as a productive post-structural concept. The researcher, participants, and findings are positioned as mutually constituted elements in an enmeshed entanglement of discursive processes, material contexts, animate bodies, and social norms and practices. The work employs concepts introduced by Deleuze and Guattari (1987): the rhizome, assemblage, and affect. The chapter discusses how the activity that constituted the research study was informed and influenced by affect that reverberated beyond the scope of the immediately observable. The multiple positionalities, past history, and values of the researcher and participant contributed to the methodological decision-making during data collection and analysis in conscious and unconscious ways. Affective distributions permeated throughout the study, contributing to the functioning of activity among and between the elements of the study. Ultimately, elements of the study contributed in ways that extended beyond the normative constructions of research, researcher, and participant. Elements affected and were affected, contributing to methodological excess, insights beyond the scope of normative systemic inquiry. This chapter demonstrates the productiveness of rhizomatic concepts to decenter the elements of a research study and affect as a productive construct to understand systematic inquiry. This move intentionally disrupts traditional conceptions of research and researcher objectivity, explicitly attending to the affective interplay among elements of the research assemblage and how this interplay functions as a primary means of scholarly engagement.
This book presents an empirical study utilizing Deleuzian Dominant conceptions in the field of education position teacher development and teaching as linear, cause and effect transactions completed by teachers as isolated, autonomous actors. Yet rhizomatics, an emergent non-linear philosophy created by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, offers a perspective that counters these assumptions that reduce the complexity of classroom activity and phenomena. In Becoming-Teacher: A Rhizomatic Look at First-Year Teaching, Strom and Martin employ rhizomatics to analyze the experiences of Mauro, Bruce, and June, three first-year science teachers in a highly diverse, urban school district. Reporting on the ways that they constructed their practices during the first several months of entry into the teaching profession, authors explore how these teachers negotiated their pre-professional learning from an inquiry and social-justice oriented teacher residency program with their own professional agendas, understandings, students, and context. Across all three cases, the work of teaching emerged as jointly produced by the activity of multiple elements and simultaneously shaped by macro- and micropolitical forces. This innovative approach to investigating the multiple interactions that emerge in the first year of teaching provides a complex perspective of the role of preservice teacher learning and the non-linear processes of becoming-teacher. Of interest to teachers, teacher educators, and education researchers, the cases discussed in this text provide theoretically-informed analyses that highlight means of supporting teachers in enacting socially-just practices, interrupting a dominant educational paradigm detrimental to students and teachers, and engaging with productive tools to theorize a resistance to the neoliberal education movement at the classroom level.
Recent accountability policies seek to “grade” teacher preparation programs by the teaching evaluations of their graduates. This article addresses the problematic nature of the linear thinking underlying such reforms by examining the construction of teaching practices of Mauro, a first-year secondary science teacher who taught environmental and earth sciences. Drawn from a larger data set, the study uses concepts from rhizomatics, a non-linear theory of thought and social activity, and elements of postmodern grounded theory. Despite holding key factors constant across the two subject area settings, differences in the ways the teacher, students, and contextual conditions worked together helped produce strikingly different teaching practices in each set of classes. This study provides evidence that enacting pre-professional learning is a complex undertaking shaped by the ways the elements present in the school setting work together, and, thus, teaching is a collectively negotiated activity. The author offers implications for teacher preparation practice and policy, advocating for an ontological turn in teacher education research that focuses on processes of teaching rather than outcomes alone.
In this article, we deploy ideas from Deleuze and Guattari to argue for the importance of engaging in educational research practice designed to be productive (mapping) rather than representational (tracing). First, we introduce the significance of our approach for educational research practice. Second, we unpack key constructs from Deleuze and Guattari required for constructing our argument, and we outline the shape of mapping as productive or transformative research practice. Third, we share critical summaries of several studies that utilized mapping to engage in this kind of research practice. Finally, we discuss the nature, effects, and relevance of mapping as educational research practice.
As two teachers/researchers committed to the values of social justice in the classroom, we are deeply disturbed by the explicit and implicit ways that our education system, operating through neoliberalism, reproduces the inequalities of larger society. To problematize and deterritorialize dominant neoliberal notions of schooling, education, teaching, and learning in our classrooms, we embarked on a co/autoethnographic self-study of our teaching practice. Our methods are underscored and informed by the Deleuzo-Guattarian notion of the rhizome, the multiplistic, nonlinear nature of which serves as an antidote to the hierarchical, dichotomous, and process–product rationality of neoliberal logic. Findings, or becomings, indicate that the concepts of the rhizome can be practically put to work in the classroom to raise consciousness and inform thinking about resisting the neoliberal status quo. Combined with co/autoethnography, rhizomatics and rhizoanalysis offer the potential to connect across teaching practice, understand the political nature of teaching, and open possibilities for transforming teaching.
This self-study explores the range of stories I tell about coming to teach, my perceptions of the various audiences as I engage in the telling of such stories, and the competing and conflicting plotlines entailed in the set of stories. Using positioning theory and narrative inquiry tools, I identify and unpack a canon of stories that have one of two plotlines: “Of course I am a teacher” and “I never intended to become a teacher.” I conclude by describing the effects of this self-study on my work both with students in school and with teacher candidates preparing to teach.
The author analyzes self-study research in Teaching and Teacher Education (TATE). An introduction to self-study of professional practice as scholarship and methodology is followed by descriptions of 10 selected articles. Next is a presentation of 10 self-study characteristics identified in the articles. The final analysis shows three broad self-study research contributions: a) teachers and teacher educators advance the education field by becoming accomplished practitioner-researchers, b) a self-directed professional learning paradigm is advantageous for teachers' and teacher educators' professional development, and c) when teachers and teacher educators commit to their professional growth in supportive environments, they benefit themselves and others.
Dominant conceptualizations of urban and rural education settings position these as distinct, with each presenting contrasting opportunities and challenges in the work of teachers. Consequently, it is unsurprising that teacher education research, focused on one of these settings, by and large fails to consider the commonalities that both of these contexts may in fact possess. In this chapter, the authors (an urban teacher educator and a rural teacher educator) report on a collaborative self-study they conducted that was focused on their teacher education practices in their respective settings. The purpose was to identify how an inquiry that attends to the materiality of these diverse educative and professional contexts could inform the preparation of future teachers and contribute to emergent perspectives on urban and rural teacher education. The inquiry is conceptually grounded in new materialism. As such, the authors not only investigated their teaching practices, but also how materiality and affect functioned to shape engagement with students, the institutional setting, and each other. Findings suggest that urban and rural teacher education possess shared commonalities, that the material structures in each setting serve to shape beliefs about teaching and learning, and that affect functions as an agentic force in the enactment of pedagogical practices. The chapter provides implications for teacher education and future research.
In this chapter the author aims to better understand her self-in-practice as a relational teacher educator who takes up social justice, in part, through modeling humanizing pedagogies. Specifically, she examined her pedagogical practices to see how these might reimagine her identity as a relational teacher educator when teaching remotely. To do this, she conducted a self-study and analyzed the data set through the dimensions of relational teacher education with a nod to extant self-studies. The findings are within the dimensions of relational teacher education. In this way, the self-study to explores her practice in times of radical change. By analyzing the data through the dimensions of relational teacher education, the saw how teaching remotely actually enhanced the scope of her role and the intentionality of her efforts to relate to students. In particular, there were instances when she took on the role of caregiver for students, transcending the role of teacher educator, and providing support for preservice teachers even beyond the purview of the course. In sum, this inquiry prompted a reimagining of previously-held manifestations of relational teacher education. Findings from this study extend the conversations about humanizing, person-centered pedagogies in remote teaching and learning environments.
The impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic on universities has been seismic. The requirement to pivot suddenly to remote working has required the development of contingency curriculums, socially distanced campuses and an increased demand for online learning. This paper sets out to capture the emergent working practices and experiences of a group of Teacher Educators (TEs) from a university with a large Initial Teacher Education (ITE) provision. The findings suggest that TEs have proved agile, resilient and creative in the immediate short term. They modified their pedagogies and practices to manage the successful completion of existing programmes remotely, developing contingent online Communities of Inquiry (CoI). This continues in the current academic year as the TEs develop blended learning programmes to meet the university restrictions of limited face-to-face teaching. A longer-term view presents TEs with additional challenges, in terms of (re)designing curricula, assessments and accessibility. There are positive lessons for teacher education in terms of the benefits of new technological understanding and pedagogical adaptations. There is a need for further professional development of TEs and Universities will need to skill up and kit up TEs to enable them to meet the needs of an uncertain future and the “next normal”. Further research into the implications of any redesigns of ITE to a blended provision aimed at meeting the needs of an uncertain future will be needed.
As collaborative theatre-makers, university teachers, and researchers in South Africa, our symbiotic, interactive relationship has shaped the construction of our academic identities. The displacement caused by social distancing regulations and repeated government-mandated lockdowns, as well as our own shifting circumstances, have forced us to re-examine these academic identities as we negotiate the challenges of working together while not being able to inhabit the same physical space. In this study, we work dialogically, collaboratively and reciprocally, to interrogate our identities as educators in a creative discipline. Using poetic inquiry and reciprocal found poetry, we examined our teaching experiences in the moment of rupture created by the Covid-19 pandemic. We explore how we are (re)learning and (re)imagining who we are as teachers and what we do with, and for, our students, through interrogating our lived experiences in poetic form. In so doing, we recognize how, by accepting fluidity and contingency, having an ethic of care for ourselves and for our students, accepting our vulnerability, and trusting our resilience, we begin to find the positives, and to embrace, rather than resist, the challenges we are facing. Our process of creating our reciprocal found poems and the use of dialogue as a mode of analysis and meaning-making offer a methodological approach that others may find useful in developing their poetic self-study research.
This article reports on a collaborative self-study conducted by the authors (two teacher educators) as we attempted to implement a pedagogy of care during the disruptions to teacher education caused by COVID-19. Due to the pandemic, we were required to conduct our teacher education courses synchronously online through video-conferencing software. Although this mode of instruction allowed us to continue teaching despite the restrictions necessitated by COVID-19, the relational aspect of teaching and the role of care seemed to be limited and became an important concern for us. Through self-study, we aimed to improve our online teaching practices by enacting a pedagogy of care during one full semester. We detail our attempts to conceptualise a pedagogy of care for the online classroom, begin our courses from a position of care and prioritize and maintain care throughout the semester. We also present the ongoing challenges we experienced in implementing a pedagogy of care online. While recognising that everyone has been affected by COVID-19 in different ways, we hope through sharing our experiences, others can learn from them and conceptualise and implement a pedagogy of care in their contexts.
With the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, teacher colleges across the country suddenly shifted to online. In many cases, faculty, wary of shortchanging students of a meaningful learning experience, leveraged synchronous meetings as a way of compensating for the abrupt removal of face-to-face (F2F) interactions. This mixed-methods self-study explored advanced licensure candidates' perceptions of developing a Community of Inquiry (COI) across three sections of a Spring 2020 online course taught by the same instructor. This course was fashioned as a literature circle about immigrant communities and K-12 schools. In one section, five one-hour synchronous meetings punctuated the shared readings of five book-length ethnographies. The other two sections remained completely asynchronous. Sixty-nine students across the three courses were electronically surveyed at the close of the semester. Fifteen students were subsequently interviewed as an additional layer of data collection. Survey analysis indicated that monthly synchronous meetings did not significantly impact students' perceptions of COI development. Follow-up interviews provided further insights into methods that students perceived as essential for advancing teaching, cognitive, and social presences. We conclude with broad and specific recommendations for better practices and future research for COI in graduate teacher education online coursework in and beyond COVID-19.
This self-study explores the experiences and challenges that we as mothers of young children and teacher educators have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. While describing what our children experienced through remote learning and how we tried to support their learning, we reflect on their former school experiences and our teacher education practices. To do this, we address the following two research questions: (1) What were our children’s experiences in remote learning during the pandemic?; and (2) What were our experiences as mothers and teacher educators in supporting our children’s remote learning during the pandemic? Adopting a collaborative self-study methodology, we collected stories of our experiences as mothers and teacher educators during our children’s remote learning. Our data were collected through participant observations, field notes, and artifacts that our children created, as well as learning materials received from their teachers and schools during the period. In addition, we recorded virtual conferences and wrote reflective journals. The suda approach, which was developed as a research method by the authors was used for data analysis. Originally from Korean culture, suda in simple English is “chatting extensively.” It is different from small talk or chit-chat, though, as it can take a large amount of time, covering several stories in depth. The findings provide several implications for teacher education, school policy, and educational research
In this article, I use data from interviews with three social studies teachers to consider teachers’ identity development. I point to how their narratives challenge traditional linear notions of professional attainment and apprenticeship by drawing on theories from Deleuze and Guattari as well as scholars in education who have utilised Deleuzian conceptions to theorise teacher education. Becoming teacher is a way for teachers and teacher educators to rethink professional identity for the fostering of justice and equity.
Deleuze and Guattari discuss the rhizome as being "absolutely different from roots and radicles" 6. The rhizome is explained via principles. 1 and 2: connection and heterogeneity.: "any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be". Principle 3: "Principle of multiplicity" "There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines". Principle 4: "Principle of asignifying rupture" "There is a rupture in the rhizome whenever segmentary lines explode into a line of flight, but the line of flight is part of the rhizome." Principles 5 and 6: Principle of cartography and decalcomania: Where traditional thought is 'tracing', a rhizome is a map. Tracing involves laying onto reality the pattern of structure, itself a construct. "The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious". They take the term plateau from Gregory Bateson, it refers to a sustained intensity. "We call a 'plateau' any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome".
"Write with slogans: Make rhizomes, not roots, never plant!"
The International Handbook on Self-study of Teaching and Teacher Education Practices is of interest to teacher educators, teacher researchers and practitioner researchers.
This volume:
-offers an encyclopaedic review of the field of self-study;
-examines in detail self-study in a range of teaching and teacher education contexts;
-outlines a full understanding of the nature and development of self-study;
-explores the development of a professional knowledge base for teaching through self-study;
-purposefully represents self-study through research and practice;
-illustrates examples of self-study in teaching and teacher education.
This article reviews 65 studies presented at the 10th international self-study of teacher education practices conference in 2014 to determine whether emerging self-study research incorporates the five major characteristics of self-study: self-initiated inquiry that is situated and improvement-aimed; undertaken collaboratively; uses multiple research methods; and demonstrates trustworthiness. We present an analysis of 63 empirical studies with reference to the five major characteristics and several additional criteria. Our analysis indicates that most of the self-studies reported at the conference were conducted within the context of faculty teaching programs with case analysis as the predominant approach; also, most were carried out collaboratively. Multiple research methods were preferred over single methods and the most frequent analysis was presented in the form of themes and topics. This review corroborates that empirical studies generally meet the major characteristics of self-study research, although not every self-study reviewed was conducted with a defined collaborative theoretical framework. Collaboration, use of multiple research methods, and trustworthiness emerged as three characteristics that were not always addressed adequately or carefully.
In this chapter we look across the literatures of identity, inquiry, and pedagogy to explore the place of teacher educators in their institutions and the methodologies for inquiry they use to sustain themselves as instructors and scholars. Through examination of practice that represents a fundamental quality of teacher education and guided by felt obligations to students, teachers and teacher education, the evolution of identity formation as a site for the growth of professional knowledge occurs through experience. This chapter articulates the need for and potential contribution of intimate scholarship to the conversation concerning research on teacher education. We assert that intimate scholarship includes various methodologies but we privilege this label when the researcher is one of the researched. In addition, relational ontology grounds researchers with a focus on the particular rather than the universal, a coming-to-know process through dialogue and a context that includes a space of vulnerability and openness.
This self-study is an exploratory, autoethnographic journey, aiming towards understanding my becomings through the 14 years of my collaborative experience. It provides a reflective look at the effects of this unique experience on my personal–professional self, questioning my understandings and trying to identify my becomings along these years. Adapting the Deleuze–Guattarian framework, the study draws the spectrum of possibilities that create the rhizomatic connections of the collaborative space and affect the emergent subjectivities of its participants. I discuss the notions of continuity between interior and exterior processes, between the individual and others in the context of the collaborative environment and the inter-relational flux of actual and virtual possibilities. I suggest viewing this process as augmented becoming that embodies the difficulties and turbulence along with sagacity and resilience, an interweaving of rhizomatic formations that affect the ability to change and an inter-subjective ontological coming to know in relation to the learning environment and others' roles in its dynamics.
This article explores the nature of self-study of teacher education practices by examining what self-study is and how it might be conducted and reported. In working through these ideas, the article makes an argument for the need for learning through self-study to be documented in ways that might not only be accessible to others but also meaningful for their practice in teaching about teaching. Although the term self-study suggests a singular and individual approach to researching practice, the reality is that self-studies are dramatically strengthened by drawing on alternative perspectives and reframing of situations, thus data, ideas, and input that necessitate moving beyond the self. Moving beyond the self also matters because a central purpose in self-study is uncovering deeper understandings of the relationship between teaching about teaching and learning about teaching. This article argues a need for these deeper understandings to be developed in ways that enhance an articulation of a pedagogy of teacher education.
Work on eudaimonistic identity theory began in an effort to answer the question: How is an individual trying to answer identity-related
questions to know which of the many identity alternatives available is the “better” choice to make? Central to eudaimonistic
philosophy is the construct of the daimon or “true self,” those potentials of each individual that represent the best that
the person is able to become. “Living in truth to the daimon” is said to give rise to a particular form of happiness, termed
eudaimonia, a set of subjective experiences I have labeled “feelings of personal expressiveness” (Waterman, 1990, 1993). In
this chapter, I briefly review philosophical perspectives regarding the daimon and eudaimonia, starting with their origins
in classical Hellenic philosophy, most notably in Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, and in the work of contemporary eudaimonistic philosophers and personality theorists. The constructs and principles of eudaimonistic
identity theory are also presented. The goal of identity formation is identified as discovering the nature of one’s daimon
and includes (a) the discovery of personal potentials, (b) choosing one’s purposes in living, and (c) finding opportunities
to act upon those potentials and purposes in living. Marcia’s identity status paradigm is discussed as providing descriptions
of the various ways in which individuals address the task of identity formation and the implications of the processes involved
for the likelihood of achieving a successful outcome. Further, I propose that the construct of intrinsic motivation is central
to understanding the how individuals come to recognize those personal potentials that represent better outcomes to the task
of identity formation. Feelings of personal expressiveness (eudaimonia), flow, interest, and hedonic enjoyment constitute
a constellation of subjective component experienced when engaged in intrinsically motivated activities. Important contextual
predictors of intrinsic motivation include self-determination, a balance of challenges and skills, opportunities to act upon
self-realization values, and effort. The contributions of these subjective experiences and predictors to the goals and processes
of identity formation will be explored.
The present study explored the potential usefulness of global identity statuses (ideological identity) as opposed to domain-specific statuses (occupation, religion, politics) using self-report measures rather than identity interviews. A total of 339 college students from two colleges in Belgium (Europe) completed both the Extended Objective Measure of Ego-Identity Status (EOM-EIS) and the Dellas Identity Status Inventory - Occupation, Religious Beliefs, Political Ideology (DISI-ORP). Four types of evidence argued in favour of domain-specific statuses (i.e. low convergence in identity status across domains, moderate convergence between global and domain-specific identity statuses, significant gender differences in domain-specific but not in global identity statuses, and significant associations between identity process and identity content in congruent but not in incongruent domains). In line with earlier research using identity status interviews, it was concluded that adolescent identity is not to be considered a unitary construct and the use of domain-specific identity statuses is recommended whenever possible. Theoretical implications of the findings are discussed in terms of adolescents' temporal spacing of identity concerns. Finally, the limitations of identity questionnaires (additive approach to global identity statuses) are pointed out. Identity interviews (indicative approach to global statuses) can yield a very different picture of identity.
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