This second Covid-related special issue of the Journal of Education for Teaching picks up the narrative on how teacher educators across the globe have continued to respond to the (ongoing) Covid-19 pandemic. Education systems have now absorbed the initial shock of lockdowns and the multiple challenges of moving teaching and learning online, and this collection of papers draws our attention to the long-term effects of Covid-19, with the different authors reflecting on degrees of continuity and/or change within teacher education and their implications for the future.
The months between the two issues have offered the opportunity to reflect on the initial optimism in which teacher educators were considering how the pandemic could change teacher education for the better. None of the authors in the first issue underestimated the difficulties of adaptation to online teaching and learning, but there was a pervading sense that teacher educators across the world could use this hiatus to improve their programmes over the longer term; to reflect on their values and how they might be expressed through teacher educator programmes, to prepare ‘future generations of teachers to work towards a more just and equitable society’, and to remember that ‘teachers and teacher educators need to be learners themselves’ (Mutton Citation2020, 441).
The optimism is still in evidence in the second special issue. It can be seen in Rosehart et al.’s reference to the ‘gifts from the pandemic’ (x), which allowed racialised inequalities to be more widely recognised and then addressed through opening up classrooms to new, previously unrepresented voices and inviting a wider range of people to contribute to online learning. Their research participant’s comment that ‘teacher candidates or preservice student teachers were much more … focused on these kind of questions’ suggests a future workforce both more aware of inequities in the system and more willing to confront them. Similarly Young et al.’s participant’s reflection on changing what was ‘sacrosanct’ (x) about their current model of assessment suggests a greater sensitivity to students’ needs which, again, points to a more inclusive teacher education in the future. Kidd and Murray write of new, positive forms of communication with and between staff and students, and cultivation of more personalised relationships. Burn et al. describe lasting change to their initial teacher education programmes, brought about by experimentation with different pedagogical approaches and reflection on the underpinning principles of their programmes; Donitsa-Schmidt and Ramon and Zhou and Song comment on the digital technology skills teacher educators learned as a result of moving teaching online, and on their increased confidence in using these technologies. These are, indeed, developments that augur well for teacher education as we move towards the possibility of a post-pandemic world. At the same time, it is important to recognise the generosity with which the educational workforce responded to Covid-related demands; Rosehart et al. write of how practicum teachers ‘went out of their way to support student-teachers’ and note the generosity of spirit they witnessed during these difficult months (x), while Kidd and Murray’s educators spoke of how the community of educators, learners and their parents was strengthened by the personalised relationships created by the intimacy of online learning in which both educators and learners could see into each others’ homes. Many of us in teacher education around the world will have seen similar attitudes and responses.
While these are themes seen across the papers, the individual articles focus on a particular aspect of responding to the pandemic. Kidd and Murray’s qualitative study with school teachers and university-based teacher educators in England explores the challenges related to reconstructing professional selves and practices in an online environment. Drawing on Goffman’s concepts of dramaturgy and self-presentation, the authors argue that changes in the power relationships between learners and educators were unsettling and prompted educators to create a new, online self that demonstrated educators’ ‘pedagogic agility’. Kidd and Murray suggest future educators need to have the pedagogic confidence to alter practice while making informed decisions about practice that are underpinned by learner-centred values.
Donitsa-Schmidt and Ramot’s quantitative study focuses on Israeli teacher educators’ sense of self-efficacy, professional learning and professional identities in research conducted across 21 colleges of education and nine research universities. The authors see Covid-19 as a boundary-crossing event in which professionals are expected to continue performing in an unfamiliar situation without preparation or proper qualification, leading teacher educators to ‘learn many things they had not planned to learn’ (x) while opening opportunities for rich personal and professional learning. They report that teacher educators were highly satisfied with their professional performance, and that informal and non-formal professional learning were regarded as more helpful than formal learning provided by institutions. They suggest that teacher educators have become successful boundary-crossers in a way that has strengthened Israeli higher education and demanded more creativity, openness and entrepreneurship among teacher educators.
Zhou and Song’s paper is a quantitative study conducted in mainland China with participants from 21 universities and colleges. Using social cognitive career theory as a framework for their research, they interrogate a series of hypotheses that explore links between professional identity, self-efficacy, interest in digital technology and expected outcomes to determine teacher educators’ intentions in relation to their future use of digital technology. The authors report that teacher educators’ intentions to continue with online learning were related to their interest in and expected outcomes of online learning, that intentions were influenced by long-held pedagogical beliefs, and that a learning community contributed to teacher educators’ self-efficacy. They, too, focus on future training to support future teacher educators, particularly at the entry level; they argue that institutions should pay attention to teacher educator feedback to ensure that digital technology meets their pedagogical needs.
We then move back to England, with a paper from Burn et al. that discusses how opportunities for learning afforded by the pandemic were transformed into sustained professional growth. Theyargue that a key to meaningful education is the ability for student teachers and teacher educators to engage affectively in collaborative and supportive relationships; that the move to online learning required teacher educators to think differently about how to build this type of relationship. The authors draw on Clarke and Hollingsworth’s model of professional learning to analyse three examples of enduring change within their university’s postgraduate programme, emphasising the importance of underlying values and scope for reflection in sustaining professional growth. They warn, however, that teacher educators’ scope for continuing to act as ‘adaptive and agentic professionals’ (x) has been constrained by their exclusion by the UK government from any role in policy formation.
Young et al,’s paper from Ireland also reflects on the way in which the pandemic has shaped the experience of teacher educators, this time for those involved in school placement. Their qualitative research, with data from online survey, focus groups and researcher reflections, uses Mezirow’s transformative learning framework in combination with Rolfe et al.’s reflective model to examine the complexity of the school placement role, the increase in stress and workload for those involved in school placement, and how the ongoing challenges, many of which have been exacerbated by the pandemic, should be addressed. The authors report on positive changes undertaken within school placement practice but, as Burn et al. have done, comment on the difficulty of influencing policy to ensure lasting change; they argue that there is now an ‘urgent need to address the national context of school placement in Ireland’ (x).
The final research paper for this issue comes from Canada. Informed by the concepts of serendipity and zemblanity, Rosehart et al. draw on a small sample of educators from five universities to analyse how Covid-19 enabled significant, positive and sometimes unanticipated changes within teacher education programmes as well as ‘some unfortunate occurrences’ (x). They argue that serendipitous discoveries led to programme changes, pedagogical innovation and opportunities in which to re-imagine teacher education models; zemblaneous experiences included systems becoming overly rigid and constricted and, as the pandemic continued, some educational systems ‘reorganising to revert to the status quo’ (x). The authors report that it is unsustainable to respond to a situation which requires constant innovation, and that a balance of continuity and change provides the ideal circumstances for fostering a pedagogy of reinvention.
To bring this special issue to a conclusion, the editors reflect on the wider, systemic issues raised by these papers. We argue that the pandemic has exposed what we call the (fr)agility of teacher education; the agility of the immediate positive and generous response by dedicated professionals determined to make the best of a difficult emergency situation, which has enabled us to see more clearly the fragility of teacher education in the context of institutional and systemic, policy-related challenges. We raise questions about the digital agenda and argue that the concept of the agile teacher needs to be interrogated further to ensure that educators are not compliant, malleable professionals but ones who think carefully about the values underpinning their practices. Finally, we suggest two ways in which teacher educators can make lasting change: through digital infrastructure set up during the pandemic, facilitated through new found teacher educator digital skills, and through a new importance placed on staff and student wellbeing. The need for a caring agenda that actively supports all involved with teacher education is a theme that runs through all these special issue contributions. Collaborative, supportive relationships are, as Burn et al. suggest, the key to meaningful learning.