Early Childhood Educators as COVID Warriors: Adaptations and Responsiveness to the Pandemic Across Five Countries

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has seriously impacted countries across the globe. The pandemic has created a completely new teaching–learning environment of interaction for early childhood educators. In many countries, face-to-face teaching has been replaced by remote teaching, while in others, there have been intermittent lockdowns and limited interruptions to regular teaching norms. Given the play-based nature of preschool teaching–learning activities in most countries, educators are required to reimagine the sociocultural relationships to their pedagogical practices in their everyday teaching–learning contexts. This paper sheds light on educators’ experiences and the dramatic shift in their indoor–outdoor teaching–learning environment due to the evolving health measures. The study draws on notions of teachers’ identities and Vygotsky’s cultural–historical concept of social situation of development (Vygotsky, 1994) to capture the new forms of relationships that early childhood educators experienced with their pedagogical environments across different countries during the pandemic. Data were collected from preschool teachers across five countries—Australia, Bangladesh, Norway, Singapore and India using online surveys which included open- and close-ended questions. Findings reveal the on-ground realities and teachers’ adaptations to new pedagogies emerging across the five countries. The new digital environments provided an equally new dimension for change. These changes were seen in interactions, relationships within the everyday pedagogical contexts, as well as the shifting physical and social environment of early years educators.