The impacts of COVID-19 on teaching practice and opportunities for virtual internships

At the time of writing, 153 countries have closed their schools and universities, affecting almost 70% of the world’s student population. Although higher education institutions have made a rapid shift to teaching online and in hybrid modes, degree programmes where experiential learning forms a core element remain shrouded in uncertainty while physical placements in workplaces are not possible. The pandemic has required teachers to innovate in a multitude of different ways to adopt new methods to deliver teaching online, provide feedback and assessment. This is a particularly urgent issue for teachers in training as the possibility of school placement remains unclear over the upcoming academic years.

The socio-economic impacts of the pandemic have also posed difficult questions around supporting learners who have varying access to technological resources and the challenge of building caring relationships with these learners while the institutional boundaries of learning become more fluid. There is an urgent need to examine these processes so as to ensure the quality of education and student well-being.

This project, based at teacher education programmes at the University of Edinburgh (UK) and Monash University (Australia), seeks to explore the impact of COVID-19 on teaching practice in pre-tertiary levels, identify challenges and good practices in supporting students during these difficult times, thereby informing the design of a virtual internship for trainee teachers who continue to face disruptions in experiential learning. By understanding teachers’ relational work during the pandemic, how they deal with difficulties related to teaching and pastoral care, how they establish and maintain supportive relationships within and beyond school contexts to provide student support, we will be able to better respond to the changes introduced by the pandemic and be better provisioned to design virtual internships to enhance experiential learning for teachers. In this project, our first objective is to capture the challenges that teachers face during the time of COVID-19 and use the lessons learnt from the way teachers deal with the crisis situations through collaborative work with others to inform the design of a virtual internship.