Rethinking teacher education in a VUCA world: student teachers’ social-emotional competencies during the Covid-19 crisis

ABSTRACT

Policy documents from OECD and UNESCO have been stressing the need to prepare students for what has been termed a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world. They emphasise social-emotional competencies as necessary for coping with such conditions. This qualitative research frames the COVID-19 outbreak as an extreme case of VUCA that grants the opportunity to examine whether our teacher preparation curriculum provides teacher students with these social-emotional competencies that they are expected to model and are necessary for coping with such circumstances. Fifty-four student teachers and 24 teacher educators responded to open-ended questionnaires, and 16 semi-structured interviews with teacher educators were analysed based on grounded theory. Results demonstrate that our student teachers struggle substantially with VUCA circumstances and do not seem to receive sufficient preparation in the domain of social-emotional competencies. These troubling findings serve as a wake-up call to increase a social-emotional orientation in teacher education curriculum.

KEYWORDS:

• Social-Emotional Competencies
• VUCA
• Teacher Education; Curriculum
• Coping

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Linor L. Hadar

Linor, L. Hadar is an Associate Professor at Beit Berl College in Israel. She is the head of the curriculum studies lab. She also developed and now heads a new Master’s in Teaching program for primary education. Her research focuses on the study of curriculum and pedagogy. Within this area her work centres on thinking education, teacher education, communal learning, and professional learning of teachers and teacher educators. Among her publications: ”Talk about student learning: Promoting professional growth among teacher educators” (Teaching and Teacher Education, 2016); Individual growth and institutional advancement: The in-house model for teacher educators’ professional learning” (Teaching and Teacher Education, 2018); “Professional learning and development of teacher educators”. (International Handbook of Research on Teacher Education, 2017).  She recently published a book “Teacher educators' professional learning in community” (Routledge, 2017). In this book she summarizes seven years of research.

Oren Ergas

Oren Ergas is a Senior Lecturer at Beit Berl College. His research and teaching focus on the incorporation of contemplative practices in education and teacher education. He has published widely in the fields of curriculum theory, philosophy of education and teacher education. His book Reconstructing 'Education' through Mindful Attention was published in 2017 in Palgrave Macmillan. 

Bracha Alpert

Bracha Alpert is an Associate Professor of education and holds a Master degree from Tel Aviv University in Educational studies and a Ph.D from Stanford University in Curriculum and Teacher Education. Her research and writing have focused on curriculum, instruction, and qualitative research and for over three decades she has been lecturing at Beit Berl College in these areas. During 2013 - 2019 she served at the college as Dean of the faculty of education. At the Mofet institute in Tel Aviv she is leading workshops on qualitative research methods and writing.

Tamar Ariav

Tamar Ariav is an Associate Professor of education who is the president of Beit Berl College in Israel for the last twelve years. She holds a Master degree from Tel Aviv University and a Ph.D from the University of Pennsylvania, both in C&I. After being a schoolteacher in Israel, Germany and the US, she joined Beit Berl and taught curriculum planning, instructional methods and evaluation. Her research over the past decades has focused primarily on teacher education policy with emphasis onclinical models for practice teaching. Tamar was a member of the Council for Higher Education in Israel and chaired the Committee for New Frameworks in Teacher Education, which have set professional standards for teacher preparation at the national level until today.