(Re)considering Motivational Scaffolding: A Mixed-Method Study on Turkish Students' Perspectives on Online Learning Before and During the Pandemic

Motivational scaffolding is of key importance in online learning since online learners are isolated alone. Recently, this need has doubled with the educational disruption because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which moved classroom learning to entirely online. However, little research has been particularly conducted to explore the perceptions of online learning before and during the pandemic. Therefore, this study empirically investigated 26 university-level Turkish students' experiences in learning online before the pandemic and teacher support in the time of crisis. Data were collected through a mixed-method research design conducting a questionnaire and interviewing via dialogue journals and essay writing. The data were analysed through descriptive statistics and coding themes based on deductive and inductive approaches. The findings from quantitative data analysis revealed that students believed the advantages of online learning resources (OLRs) for their own learning but still needed teacher support. Furthermore, the results from the qualitative data analysis demonstrated that students needed teacher-student interaction most and favoured motivational scaffolding in this regard. The study shed light on the role of caring for learning as motivational scaffolding and calls for an institutional development for the integration of pedagogy of care into online education.

A pedagogy of care for information literacy and metaliteracy asynchronous online instruction

A pedagogy of care embraces elements of critical pedagogy, culturally responsive pedagogy, trauma-informed pedagogy, and feminist pedagogy in order to create educational spaces wherein the learner feels seen as an individual and cared for, and in turn enacts care for others. Although since the COVID pandemic there has been more exploration of care in the online environment, a pedagogy of care in a completely asynchronous environment has not received as much attention as other modes of online instruction. Similarly, while much research into metaliterate learning has to-date focused on the cognitive, metacognitive and behavioral domains of learning, there has been little focus on the affective domain. This article presents an exploratory, qualitative study to explore two questions: • Can a pedagogy of care effectively be applied in the asynchronous online environment?, and • Could prioritizing the affective domain of learning help support applying metaliteracy in practice? It is proposed that a pedagogy of care, described here as being implemented in an online library general education course, could play a role in bolstering students' comfort with the emotional aspects of information and promote metaliterate learning. © 2023 Elsevier Inc.

Pedagogy of Care: Building a Teaching and Learning Community

The COVID-19 pandemic shook the educational system to the core. Teaching moved from the classroom to the private space of teachers and students. The unexpected move to digital teaching and learning rendered "in-person” interaction impossible, forcing all of us working in education to reconsider what responsible pedagogy should look like during a crisis. In this article, we first elaborate the main ideas of the pedagogy of care. Then, we offer examples of teaching and learning during the pandemic from our personal experience of literary and language scholars, based in Serbia and Poland respectively. This experience has been shaped by our pedagogical choices and informed by our epistemological and eth-ical standpoints. © 2022, Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Slavic Studies. All rights reserved.

Academic discourse on education during the early part of the pandemic.

As the global COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden transition to emergency online education in early 2020, academic discourse quickly shifted to focus on the new situation and what could be learned from it. The present study gives an overview of the discourse on education during the pandemic in publications that appeared in the top-50 journals on the Clarivate Education list in the period April 2020-May 2021. Based on a final selection of 63 articles and 12 editorials, mostly on higher education, five main themes were identified: affect, teaching practice, teaching context, achievement and assessment, and equity. The academic discourse in these publications indicates that the emergency situation exacerbated previously existing issues: mental distress was observed to rise sharply for all stakeholders and gaps in access to education between different social groups widened. In response, teachers revisited the core values of education to guide them in approaching online teaching. Management focused less on procedures and communicated in a more human and empathic way. We argue that the acute interconnectedness experienced during the pandemic can be used to develop a pedagogy of care in which support is explicitly organized on both socio-emotional and academic levels.

Student Reflections on the Shift to Emergency Remote Teaching in Academic Writing Classes during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study investigated how the shift to emergency remote teaching affected students’ academic reading and writing development in an American university in the UAE right after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants were forty-eight students enrolled in the three academic writing classes I taught in Spring 2020. The primary data source was the students’ reflective writing assignments. The analysis of the data revealed a variety of expected and unexpected problems faced by the students such as technical difficulties and internet access, lock down measures, difficulty in concentration, personal and family circumstances, as well as increased emotional distress. The students narrated how they navigated these challenges and adjusted to their new reality through a number of creative coping strategies, new study habits and personal strengths they discovered about themselves. These findings suggest that several strategies and practices can contribute to creating a more humanistic environment conducive to learning during times of crisis and highlight the significance of a pedagogy of care, affection and empathy. © 2022, Editorial Board English Scholarship Beyond Borders. All rights reserved.

We were all learning and doing our best: Investigating how Enabling educators promoted student belonging in a time of significant complexity and unpredictability

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted education provision worldwide. In Australia, the government took a proactive stance to reduce the impact of the pandemic, temporarily banning higher education students from attending university campuses. With a lockdown in place, educational institutions required a rapid shift in approaches to teaching and learning by both educators and students. Educators throughout Australia were asked to work from home and quickly transition their face-to-face (synchronous) classes into bichronous, fully online offerings. This paper reports on the experiences of 25 educators in an enabling course in a regional Australian university who were required to make this shift. These educators not only had to navigate this complex time personally, but they also had to work in their professional role with the additional responsibility of ensuring a particularly vulnerable cohort of non-traditional students felt a sense of belonging within this new educational space. Results showed that while the educators encountered a number of challenges in their transition, they also found ways to promote student belonging in the new teaching and learning environment. With a Pedagogy of Care being central to the educators’ practice, they developed strategies to create a sense of emotional engagement among students to help them feel genuinely cared for. Additionally, they were able to construct a ‘we mentality’ discourse to establish a sense of shared understanding with students around the situation they were in. This study shows that enabling educators are capable of responding creatively to a complex and unpredictable environment, finding ways to replicate their proven pedagogies of care in unfamiliar contexts and thus foster a crucial sense of belonging among enabling students. The implications of a discussion about ‘care’ and ‘belonging’ within the field of enabling education are critical at the intra-pandemic and post-pandemic times, when traditional teaching methodologies are in flux. © 2022, University of Wollongong. All rights reserved.

Teaching Care During Covid-19: Reflective Assessment for Becoming-Historians

This article argues that the Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) that took place during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021 left learners and teachers alike awash in feelings of helplessness, loss, and anguish. While online learning literacy and pedagogy have improved over the course of 2020 and 2021, and interesting and important innovations have been implemented and explored, the foundational inequalities have not lessened or disappeared. This article argues for the use of care as a necessary pedagogy in the virtual classroom using a case study of one class. The labour of care needs to be considered as part of the labour of pedagogy during Covid-19. I argue for care being built into both pedagogy and assessment as part of a radical pedagogy for this time. I explore reflective assessment embedded in a pedagogy of care as a way to, if not combat, recognise and respond to the inequalities embodied in ERT and the society it exists in, towards radical change. Active reflection draws out the impact that ERT has had on the "being" and "becoming" of pre-service History teachers.

Design considerations in emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic: a human-centered approach.

This paper is in response to the article entitled "The process of designing for learning: understanding university teachers' design work" (Bennett et al., Educ Tech Res Dev 65:125-145, 2017). Bennett et al. (Educ Tech Res Dev 65:125-145) present a descriptive model of the design process that reports findings from a qualitative study investigating the design processes of 30 instructors from 16 Australian universities through semi-structured interviews. This exploratory study provides rich, contextualized descriptions about university teachers' design process and pinpoints key design characteristics as top-down, breadth-first, iterative, responsive, and reflective. These key design characteristics revealed by the rich contextual descriptions could provide applicable insights into the design process especially for new instructors. The findings of the study could inform how learning design could be adapted during an emergency remote teaching (ERT) as it is dynamic and open to revision. A noteworthy limitation of the study is that complementary data such as design artifacts could be utilized to ensure data triangulation in addition to self-reported data obtained via interviews. The study found that university instructors' design process did not appear to draw on instructional design models. Therefore, future studies could focus on to what extent and how such models could be used by university instructors. Lastly, future studies may explore how technology is used in ERT design to support their needs. In this article, I share how design can be informed by humanizing pedagogy and pedagogy of care during ERT.