EARLY CHILDHOOD STUDENT TEACHING PRACTICUM IN TURKEY THROUGH EMERGENCY REMOTE TEACHING DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

Turkish early childhood pre-service teachers had to follow their student teaching practicum courses through emergency remote teaching on the online platform available to them during COVID-19 pandemic like in most countries. The pre-service teachers were experimenting with this new form of student teaching practicum by building up new knowledge and experiences without being present in the school context and having no interaction with the children. This study aims to analyse early childhood education pre-service teachers' experiences of emergency remote teaching (ERT) during COVID-19 Pandemic in Turkey and explore how these experiences shape their professional development to meet the quality standards and preschool teacher competencies. Doing a content analysis of the codes through a qualitative data analysis software program (NVivo 12) and making a constant comparison between codes and categories, three themes as a result of this study after doing a content analysis of the data, have emerged: (1) Early childhood education pre-service teachers’ practices in ERT supported only certain competencies. (2) With its natural structure of distance education, ERT restrained pre-service teachers' field experiences to enable them to gain the necessary competencies and qualifications for early childhood education (3) the pre-service teachers perceived ERT as insufficient for their placement experiences. There is a need for a regulation on how the practice in teacher education should be done in ERT since pre-service teachers' field placements have a crucial role in their training and there is a missing gap for practice during distance education. Keywords: Early childhood education, emergency remote teaching, COVID-19 pandemic, preservice teachers