The shockingly sudden move to online teaching in March 2020 as a response to COVID-19 lockdowns is still fresh in many educators’ minds. This abrupt shift had significant effects on academic life that still reverberate today. But which aspects of academic life were most affected by implementing emergency remote teaching (ERT) during the pandemic, and why? Natalia Gajdamaschko, teaching professor in the SFU Faculty of Education, and co-author Sally Vinden of Vancouver Island University explored this topic in a paper aiming to identify the overarching themes of the pandemic’s effect on the educational system.
Dr. Gajdamaschko is a past recipient of the Faculty of Education’s Award for Excellence in Scholarly Teaching. Her areas of research and teaching include Vygotsky’s educational theory; cross-cultural investigation in psychology, education, and public policy; and psychological aspects of management. She also employs activity theory and Q-methodology in her work, both used in this paper for insights into the effects of ERT during the pandemic.
Drs. Gajdamaschko and Vinden constructed an array of statements expressing ideas, attitudes, feelings, values, and perceptions that academics might associate with changes in teaching and learning experiences during the pandemic. A mix of 39 professors and graduate students from the Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University sorted the 51 statements using Q-methodology software.
From this activity, four categories of attitudes emerged: Digitally Overwhelmed, Digital Optimists, Non-Digital Traditionalists, and Digital Empaths. For the overwhelmed, concerns about disruptions to student and faculty lives caused by the introduction of ERT were exaggerated by a lack of competency in navigating digital teaching tools. Optimists, on the other hand, saw online teaching as an opportunity for positive change, with digital pedagogy tools holding promise to create a more inclusive educational system and learning experiences. Traditionalists considered ERT a temporary disruption and did not see online instructional technologies as positive, while empaths, recognizing the impact of ERT on learners’ mental health, were concerned about a general lack of empathy and compassion shown to students by faculty members. (Full article link here.)
This study encourages more attentiveness to how people infuse different and sometimes opposite meanings into a teaching activity. These insights into the complex and contradictory experiences of academics during the pandemic urge better ways to adapt and support students and educators in a rapidly changing academic environment.
F T