Pandemic Pedagogy: Educators' Practices During the Covid-19 Pandemic

The disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic necessitated a move from face-to-face teaching to fully online teaching, creating new challenges and opportunities for educators. In this chapter we explore how instructors' practices were affected by this emergency situation and the nature of changes in their conception of teaching/learning and their roles as teacher educators. Data from interviews and narratives contributed by a large number of educators spanning a variety of educational and geographical contexts have been analyzed using Lewin's three-stage model of change. This is cross-referenced against a theoretical framework informed by a sociocultural view of teaching and learning to examine the transformative nature of teaching and learning promoted by pandemic pedagogical practices. The findings show that educators' practices have necessarily had to evolve or even change significantly in order to fit the new online instructional mode. However, it is not possible to establish that these were largely transformative in nature beyond serving the existing institutional outcome needs more or less efficiently. This implies that further investment is needed in teacher education to facilitate remote teaching, redesign teaching, and reconsider technology in new ways which go beyond it being a simple tool for the transmission of knowledge. Equally important would be to support educators to put ‘Maslow before Bloom,’ meaning that safety and well-being must be given priority over teaching and learning as the mental, emotional, and physical challenges experienced during the pandemic will continue to linger post pandemic.