Abstract
This paper takes an interest in how schools and teachers dealt with new demands when teaching rapidly went online during school closures related to the COVID-19 pandemic, in what we see as an example of emergency remote teaching. The aim is to make visible how schools and teachers dealt with the demands that they were confronted with while under hard pressure during emergency remote teaching, and what discursive frames are used in upper secondary teachers’ pedagogical considerations. Fifteen teachers of history, mathematics and Swedish (five from each subject) are followed in recurring interviews between April 2020 and September 2020, resulting in a total of 41 interviews. A narrative approach is used in the analysis and results show how teachers made large efforts to maintain teaching in what can be described as a crisis organization. Three main discourses are identified: (a) a strong assessment discourse; (b) a relational discourse; and (c) a compensatory discourse. The findings are discussed in the light of educational policy based on the so-called Nordic model and the idea of one-school-for all, and in relation to what becomes possible to teach as well as what is not possible to do in times of crisis.
Highlights
School systems all over Europe have had to adapt to some level of online remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic
In Sweden, which is the case in this article, upper secondary schools were forced to shift to full online teaching at extremely short notice in March 2020, a situation that lasted throughout the remainder of the spring semester
They say, the present situation must be understood as a response to a very specific crisis and could best be described as Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) as it is not teaching that is planned to be online, but ‘a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances’ (Hodges et al, 2020)
Summary
School systems all over Europe have had to adapt to some level of online remote teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Stenliden et al (2020) highlight, in a preprint of a study based on action research during ERT, how digital solutions intervene in the material framing of teaching and challenge the bodily tools with which interaction and communication are mediated in the ordinary classroom They argue that if education as a field is going to gain something from this pandemic event, there is a need to understand remote teaching beyond results in terms of what is possible to measure and instead to a higher degree embrace teachers’ qualitative experiences and reflective thinking. For our analysis we only needed audio recordings, we used separate unconnected audio recorders that were placed beside the computer
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