Chapter 7: Struggles and Stress: Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on STEM Preservice Teachers

The COVID-19 pandemic created significant disruption to the Spring semester of 2020 and beyond, including how we think about instructional practices in our nation’s classrooms. Educators were forced to reinvent their courses to online teaching caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, simultaneously navigating a public health crisis. As the summer progressed, many K–12 educators were nervous about how the fall of 2020 would start off. Would the students be in person? Would they be online? Would they be doing both? While both higher education and K–12 faculty were forced to transition into online teaching quickly, preservice teachers (PSTs) who are both students and teachers were vulnerable to the other pandemic stressors in ways that were not visible to their professors and mentor teachers. These include financial stressors, future job prospects, technology, Wi-Fi access, new family responsibilities, and economic insecurity (Beaunoyer et al., 2020). As the first full school year within the pandemic continues, we recognize that our PSTs are experiencing teaching in a completely different way than their peers in the past. Our paper highlights the experiences and challenges of PSTs amid the COVID-19 pandemic.