Urban-rural divide and COVID-19: engaging teachers to assess and improve the Philippine basic education-learning continuity plan

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed poverty and exacerbated social inequality. Our role as academics is to illuminate these social issues to help policy makers address them adequately. Hence, we conducted this ethnographic study situated within the discourse urban-rural divide to assess the Philippine Basic Education-Learning Continuity Plan (BE-LCP), a COVID-19 education response, through the help of three teachers who, like us, the researchers, have been exposed to the rural and urban areas in Sindangan, Zamboanga del Norte. In our effort to promote social justice and equity in education, we have privileged the voices of those in the marginalized rural sector. We interviewed the teacher key actors, conducted autoethnography and participant observation, and studied secondary sources available. Data sources were triangulated, and data transcripts were analysed through thematic analysis, drawing on relevant theories and literature. Interrelated social factors instigated by the government's biased past policies are (a) socioeconomic impact of COVID-19, (b) digital divide, (c) school location, and (d) parental education. While the pandemic affected urban and rural residents, the latter felt a severe impact. This study underscores the teacher agency in the BE-LCP policy: Teachers recommended monitoring learning outcomes, attending to low-performing learners, supporting home-based learning, and providing teaching resources. © 2023 National Institute of Education, Singapore.

Requesting a commitment in school teachers to teach in unprecedented ways: The mediating role of teacher agency

The necessity for the development and enhancement of teacher commitment to satisfying students' learning needs in response to the COVID crisis is increasingly highlighted. It is not known, however, how to increase commitment in schoolteachers to boost online teaching in light of the fact that they, too, are struggling to cope with the rapid, unexpected change. A total of 601 teachers from primary and secondary schools across China participated in this study, with an average teaching experience of 15.9 years. Structural equation modelling was used to verify the significance of contextual, cognitive, affective and behavioural factors in boosting teachers' commitment to online teaching. The findings demonstrated that teacher agency played a complete mediating role in the predicting power of other factors to teacher commitment. Therefore, it was recommended that attention be paid to the practice and opportunities for teacher agentic actions, which necessitates real encounters with online teaching, allowing teachers to act meaningfully and initiate a new set of teaching strategies. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic The large-scale transition to emergency online teaching serves as the catalyst for creating a blended or hybrid model of education provision in the long term. How hard teachers work to perform at their best and overcome obstacles to support students' learning needs in new environment relies on the intensity of teacher commitment to change. Online and blended learning requires teachers to not only be prepared for a diverse learning environment but also to build and rebuild their own identity as future teachers. What this paper adds This study adds to our knowledge of how traditional F2F classroom teachers reinvented their roles and responsibilities in response to the pandemic-driven challenges based on real-world experiences. As a result of the COVID-19 lockdown school closures, schoolteachers' commitment to enhancing online teaching efforts has increased. The study highlights the complete mediating role of teacher agency in the predicting power of cognitive and affective factors to teacher commitment. Implications for practice and/or policy To learn more about how to be a good online teacher, future teachers need greater deliberate effort in diverse online teaching activities. Future teachers should be equipped with not only new technological and remote instructional strategies and skills, but also with confidence in, value for, and actual experiences with online teaching in a technology-rich environment. For teachers to obtain hands-on experience in integrating technology with distance teaching pedagogy at a time of rapid change, schools should have some days online and offer blended learning opportunities wherever possible. © 2023 British Educational Research Association.

Democratic citizenship, critical literacy and educational policy in England: A conceptual paradox?

This article identifies a conceptual paradox between recent educational policy in England and a social-democratic understanding of critical literacy. Recent political events including Brexit, the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election, and the Coronavirus Pandemic reiterate the need for pedagogies that equip students to critique information circulated online. After setting out critical literacy's genealogy as a democratic educational model, the authors situate these theoretical approaches within the context of English secondary education reform. The article then draws on teacher agency research to consider the practical barriers to implementing a critical literacy pedagogy capable of navigating the present political landscape. Addressing gaps within literary education and digital media research, the overall argument is that educational policy in England since 2010 has served the priorities of a neoliberal state system. In this context, enacting the democratic, social-justice orientated critical literacy demanded by the challenges of communicating in the twenty-first-century is both daunting and urgent. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Pedagogy in a pandemic: Responsibilisation and agency in the (re)making of teachers

This paper focuses on the making of teachers as educational subjects within a specific socio-historical context. It attempts to create a critical ontology of teacher identity, as highlighted by pedagogical discourses during the initial stages of the Coronavirus Pandemic in Hawaiʻi and the subsequent school shut down during the 2020 Spring semester. Through autoethnographic practitioner inquiry, I analyse the relationship between education and the state, the historical and contemporary discourses at play, and the tensions of teacher agency in (re)shaping teacher identities. The paper analyses educational continuities and discontinuities in Pandemic discourses, specific to my context but resonant with national trends within the United States. These include the affective governance of responsibilisation, the amplification of inequalities, the shifting perception of the teaching profession, the proliferation of divergent pedagogical discourses and technologies, and increased teacher agency in (re)making their own identities, roles, and responsibilities within the ambiguity of the socio-historical context. © 2021 Pedagogy, Culture & Society.

The pedagogical and socio-affective dimensions of identity tensions and teacher agency: Case studies of university English teachers teaching online

The unprecedented switch to online education during the Covid-19 pandemic has posed many challenges for language teachers, such as conducting authentic language interactions with reduced modalities in virtual classrooms. Language teachers, therefore, have been confronted with identity tensions of how to reposition themselves to adapt to this new teaching space. How teachers experienced and responded to these identity tensions is critically important to the success of online education, yet this issue remains underexplored. To address this gap, our case studies drew on multiple rounds of individual interviews with four university English teachers who taught online during the pandemic. Findings reveal that individual teachers experienced varying degrees of identity tensions on the pedagogical and socio-affective dimensions. To tackle these identity tensions, the teachers took wide-ranging agentic actions in pre-, in-, and/or after-class stages to maintain an identity, adopt a new identity, switch between identities, and/or redefine identities. Findings are discussed in terms of differential identity tensions brought by online teaching to individual teachers, as well as the complex interplay between identity tensions and teacher agency. The study concludes with implications for online language teaching and language teacher development. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Language Teachers' Lives in East Asia: A Post Script for the Post-Covid World

Thanks to its multiple voices, thematic emphases and methodological approaches, this book has charted a map for an intellectually coherent and socially relevant future agenda for research on language teachers' lives in East Asia. Writing this concluding chapter in the year of the Covid-19 pandemic, I offer this reflection on future research inspired by the perspectives encompassed in the chapters of this book but placed within this larger vantage point. In her popular TED talk, the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie warned against telling single stories about people, communities or social phenomena, noting that such narratives have profound consequences for civil society. I use the warning as my guiding framework and discuss how research on language teachers' lives in East Asia can play its part in countering these narratives and offering productive alternatives in the post-Covid world. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Teaching in emergency remote classrooms: reflections for professional learning

Background Purpose Method Findings Conclusions Reflective teaching has long been regarded as playing an important, and potentially empowering, role in teachers' professional learning. The study reported in this paper considered the longer-term significance of teachers' self-reflective learning in the course of their daily emergency remote teaching during COVID-19, and how this supported teacher agency.This small-scale case study sought to explore, in depth, teachers' perceptions of how their professional learning was realised through reflective practice during emergency remote teaching.Three teachers from primary, junior high, and high schools in mainland China participated in the case study during the spring and fall semesters in 2020. They considered the accommodations they made for emergency remote teaching and the corresponding implications for their professional learning and sense of agency. Data were collected via four-monthly, semi-structured interviews, resulting in a total of five interviews per teacher. These charted the progress of their emergency remote courses in the spring, and allowed for final reflections via a follow-up interview in the fall. Data were analysed thematically.The resultant four themes and eight categories related to aspects including pedagogical strategies, home-school communication, classroom management, and teachers' technological literacy. Within these, approaches to blending online and offline coursework, valuing sociocultural concerns in classroom interaction, and developing adaptive mindsets were among areas identified as relevant to teachers' professional learning beyond the emergency remote teaching situation.The findings highlight the multiple ways in which professional learning took place through reflective teaching in the remote teaching environment. They draw attention to the importance of situating some professional learning in everyday practice. Understandings gained during remote teaching have broader implications for educators' professional learning and growth in pre-tertiary education. [ FROM AUTHOR]

Using an Ecological Approach to Explore Teacher Agency during the Implementation of a Citizen Science Education Program Using Arduino

Citizen science education is a new approach in science education for promoting scientific inquiry related to localized problems and for engaging in social action based on inquiry results. Using agency as a lens for understanding teachers' practices when using this approach is important. In this ethnographic case study, a teacher implementing a citizen science education program using Arduino was investigated from an ecological approach using temporal and relational dimensions of agency. In the iterational dimension, the teacher's own experiences and traits from life and professional histories were identified. His identity as a teacher and his religious values formed the projective dimension. Encouraging administrators, the financial difficulties of the school, and the COVID-19 pandemic were major elements of the practical-evaluative dimension. Findings reveal the complex array of the teacher's agency in the context of implementing citizen science education with Arduino with students, which contributes new understandings about science teacher agency. © 2022 by Na et al.

Scenario for Analysing Student Interactions and Orchestration Load in Collaborative and Hybrid Learning Environments

Educational environments have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and have evolved to support classes, which involve in some cases synchronous hybrid learning environments. These environments enable students attend classes online and on-site simultaneously. Synchronous hybrid environments provide a greater flexibility for students but, in contrast, are likely to increase teachers’ orchestration load and decrease interactions between students, especially between those online and those on-site. This study proposes a scenario to explore the factors affecting the orchestration load and the student interactions in collaborative and synchronous hybrid learning environments. The scenario involves the use of a collaborative learning flow pattern (jigsaw) and the technologies that will enable the data collection to understand such factors affecting to orchestration load and interaction. The outcomes from the implementation of this scenario will provide useful insights to further understand the benefits and limitations of synchronous hybrid learning environments. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

‘Becoming More of a Fairy Godmother Type of Teacher’: Teacher Identity Negotiation in a Time of Pandemic

The first years of the worldwide Covid-19 pandemic have brought unanticipated and far-reaching change to the ways language teachers have had to conceptualise and implement their practices. Many teachers have been compelled to move rapidly from classroom to online teaching which has had a substantial impact not only on their sense of identity, but also their sense of confidence in their usual practices. In this chapter, I draw on the reflections of Australian teachers working with international students in the English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas Students (ELICOS) sector, several of whom I have worked with in these early pandemic years as a facilitator of action research, as part of their professional development. Together with their colleagues, they needed to rapidly adjust their professional expectations, roles and practices. The chapter draws on short narrative comments from these teachers and illustrates how they and their colleagues drew on new concepts and mindsets to negotiate their teacher identities and to discover how they could best work with their students in the change to online environments. The data show that social, cognitive and emotional factors were major influences on these negotiations of identity. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Teaching in the era of COVID-19: From narratives of a 25 years of experienced in-service Korean elementary school teacher

This study will examine a teacher's educational belief change in the situation of COVID-19. The participant of this study is a Korean teacher who hold 25 years of teaching experience. For the data collection, 5 times of interviews, 1 diary entry, 1 letter to her students were collected. In addition to this, researchers observed the participant's daily routine in the online teaching context, more than 4 times. With these data, the teacher's narrative has been studied. The Korean teacher experienced many difficulties. Though she was veteran teacher, it was something difficult to cope with. However, she tried to find the best for her students. There were colleagues and teacher communities, and she interacted with them. Her journey in the COVID-19 situation represented that there were no changes in her teacher belief. Preferably, it was the chance to achieve teacher agency and reconstructing and firming her teacher beliefs. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)

Collaborative autoethnography in examining online teaching during the pandemic: from a ‘teacher agency’ perspective

The COVID-19 pandemic outbreak forced universities to immediately shift to online teaching, and the transition presented unprecedented challenges. This paper reports our findings from a collaborative autoethnography study with a special focus on the challenges we encountered and our agentive responses in teaching online. Data reveal four major challenges (1) unpredictable situations, (2) shifting teacher roles in online context, (3) issues on course design, expectations, grading, and feedback, and (4) technology issues. Also, we reported four agentive responses (1) adopting a positive attitude, (2) reexamining our teaching practices and educational goals, (3) exploring alternative pedagogical approaches, and (4) strategically implementing technology to enhance teaching and learning. These intentional reflections became opportunities for us to revisit our positionality, analyze our teaching experiences, and transform them into tools in supporting students. This study calls for more resources for professional development, as well as further conversations and collaborations among teachers and researchers. [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Teaching in Higher Education is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)

Representing teachers' voices: An ethnodrama of Mauritian teachers under times of curriculum reform

This article emphasises the motivation for a methodological representation choice that captures teachers' voices in a Small Island Developing State context during the introduction of a curriculum reform. The diverse voices of teachers as they inhabit a context that gears towards compliance and managed intimacy demands are explored through the representational choice of an ethnodrama. Narrative inquiry led to an ethnodrama representation that protected the anonymity and confidentiality of participants and simultaneously revealed multiple forms of agencies in entangled spatial and temporal dimensions. The findings foreground teachers' choice of agencies and representations that serve different interests influenced by whom they dialogue with in specific spaces. With a fictionalised future enactment of the ethnodrama at the end, this article closes with teachers negotiating their agency and opening reflections for future research in new normal Covid-19 spaces.

Language teacher agency in emergency online teaching

This article examines the agency of four language teachers, and the affordances and constraints in their achievement of agency, as their routines were disrupted by the sudden shift to emergency online teaching due to the global pandemic, COVID-19. Within this larger shared critical incident, this article discusses the unique critical incidents that prompted each teacher to reflect on their practice, the agency they enacted and factors influencing the actions taken. This study provides further evidence that teachers exercise their agency in line with their professional identities, and illustrates that social structural factors feature prominently in teachers' identities and enactment of agency. The practical-evaluative dimension of agency is also further elucidated with evidence that teachers use their agency to maximise the benefits, evaluating the ‘solution’ adopted as an appropriate response to multiple concerns and goals. This study has important implications for teacher development highlighting the need for professional development programmes to better prepare teachers for the diversity of teaching situations which they may encounter, particularly in relation to differences in the role of the teacher, and the power dynamics and relationships between teacher, learner(s), and parents in different teaching modes. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd

Digital affordances and teacher agency in the context of teaching Chinese as a second language during COVID-19

The outbreak of COVID-19 brought about novel digital affordances for second language (L2) teaching by moving all the universities in mainland China abruptly to emergency online schools in early 2020. This unprecedented educational situation prompted teachers to exert more teacher agency on classroom teaching, leading to more discussion on the ecology of L2 teaching in an exploratory online environment. To know more about the relationships between digital affordances and teacher agency during the pandemic, the present study tracked two teachers’ reflection on their Chinese language instruction over the 2020 spring semester to investigate how they utilized the special affordances via their teacher agency in L2 remote teaching. Reflective interviews showed their implementation of teacher agency through the use of technologies in relation to their teaching beliefs and social contexts. Framing digital affordances and teacher agency in an ecological view strengthened the links between classroom dynamics and social environment, which also implied adaptable instructional practices and resilient professional trends for future L2 online education.

Malaysian English Language Teachers’ Agency in Using Digital Technologies During the Pandemic: A Narrative Inquiry

With the closure of schools due to imposed lockdowns in many parts of the world, teachers had to make a rapid transition from teaching in physical classrooms to online teaching, even though they had little to no experience teaching online prior to the pandemic. Adopting a narrative inquiry approach, this study aims to explore the factors that influence Malaysian English language teachers’ professional agency in adapting to online teaching. Data were collected via interviews with ten secondary school teachers from rural and urban schools. The findings show how factors such as teachers’ perceptions of the affordances of digital tools and existing support structures influence teachers’ enactment of agency in online teaching and learning. They also demonstrate teachers' agentic potential to adapt their lessons to suit their learners’ needs. These findings suggest the need for teacher professional development programs to recognize teacher agency in the design of future training modules. This involves providing a differentiated training curriculum that can support and sustain language teachers’ development organically by taking into consideration their existing technology skills, teaching experiences and work contexts.Alternate :Con el cierre de los establecimientos educativos por causa de las cuarentenas impuestas en muchos lugares del mundo, los docentes se vieron obligados a hacer una transición acelerada de la enseñanza presencial en aulas físicas a la docencia en línea, aun cuando tuvieran poca o nula experiencia con ese tipo de docencia antes de la pandemia. Adoptando un enfoque de investigación narrativa, el presente estudio se propone explorar los factores que influyen en la agencia profesional de los docentes de inglés malayos en su adaptación a la docencia en línea. Se recolectaron datos por medio de entrevistas con diez docentes de educación básica secundaria de escuelas rurales y urbanas. Los resultados muestran cómo factores tales como las percepciones de los docentes sobre las posibilidades de las herramientas digitales y las estructuras de apoyo existentes influyen en el ejercicio de su agencia en la enseñanza y el aprendizaje en línea. También demuestran el potencial agentivo de los docentes para adaptar sus clases a las necesidades de los estudiantes. Estos resultados sugieren la necesidad de crear programas de desarrollo profesional que reconozcan la agencia del docente en el diseño de futuros módulos de formación. Esto implica brindar un currículo de capacitación diferenciado capaz de soportar y sostener de manera orgánica el desarrollo de los docentes de lengua tomando en cuenta sus destrezas tecnológicas previas, sus experiencias en la docencia y los contextos laborales.Alternate :Avec la fermeture des établissements d'enseignement en raison des quarantaines imposées dans de nombreuses régions du monde, les enseignants ont été contraints de faire une transition accélérée de l'enseignement présentielle dans des salles de classe à l'enseignement en ligne, même s'ils n'avaient que peu ou nulle expérience dans ce genre d’enseignement avant la pandémie. Adoptant une approche de recherche narrative, la présente étude vise à explorer les facteurs qui influencent l'agence professionnelle des enseignants d'anglais malaisiens dans leur adaptation à l'enseignement en ligne. Les données ont été recueillies au moyen d'entretiens avec dix enseignants d'enseignement secondaire dans des écoles rurales et urbaines. Les résultats montrent comment des facteurs tels que les perceptions des enseignants sur les possibilités des outils numériques et les structures de soutien existantes influencent l'exercice de l'agence des enseignants dans l'enseignement et l'apprentissage en ligne. Ils démontrent également le potentiel agent des enseignants pour adapter leurs cours aux besoins des élèves. Cela suggère la nécessité de créer des programmes de développement professionnel qui reconnaissent l'agence de l'enseignant dans la conception des futurs odules de formation. Cela implique de proposer des programmes de formation différenciée capable de supporter organiquement le développement des enseignants de langues, compte tenu de leurs compétences technologiques antérieures, de leurs expériences dans l'enseignement et de leurs contextes de travail.

Teachers' agency and online education in times of crisis.

This study examines academic teachers' agency and emergency responses, prompted by the physical closure of universities and university colleges due to the COVID-19 crisis. The pandemic-related lockdown accelerated the digitalization of education and forced teachers to adjust their teaching. A theoretical model is elucidated, in which teachers' agency is understood as the willingness to engage in iterational, practical-evaluative, projective, and transformative action despite the existence of practical, personal, and institutional constraints. We explored the nature and degree of this agency through a survey of university teachers in Norway in the first month of the lockdown. Teachers attempted to create learning environments that facilitated knowledge transfer and interaction and sought to solve problems through self-help and support from colleagues and network, although many struggled with insufficiently developed digital competence and institutional support. Latent profile and qualitative analyses revealed different clusters of teacher responses, from strong resistance to online teaching through to transformation of teaching practices. Qualitative analyses unveiled different expressions of teachers' agency, both ostensible and occlusive, whereby action was shaped by constraining circumstances. These findings can inform future studies of online teaching, indicate the conditions for development of teachers' digital competence, and illustrate the challenges brought about by crises.