Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has shifted the contextual matters of education at all levels, for example, geographic location, community engagement in education and socioeconomic factors, to mention some contextual matters. Awareness of these matters stimulates critical reflections on the depth of preservice teachers’ pedagogical content and pedagogical knowledge. This paper examines preservice teachers’ pedagogical mobility in periods that rely on disruptive innovation. Preservice teachers’ placement settings changed rapidly because of COVID-19 regulations which impacted face-to-face and online teaching and learning environments. This investigation focused on professional learning under the ambit of teacher education, which up to now has been focused on face-to-face teaching pedagogies. The rapidly changing context has made the classroom the pedagogical anchor of education theory and practice. Using a reflective case study approach, we investigated (a) preservice teachers’ pedagogical challenges, (b) the meaning of pedagogical flexibility and innovative pedagogical mobility, and (c) the application of teacher performance and teaching standards in a teaching and learning environment affected by COVID-19. The critical self-reflective narratives offer insight into lived experiences and multiple contextual challenges that raise questions about well-prepared preservice teachers.
Highlights
The challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic created limitations regarding initial teacher education (ITE) and its preparation of preservice teachers for changing contexts, in regard to their enacted “pedagogical mobility.”This paper focuses on specific events that occurred for one graduating preservice teacher and an ITE educator after the sudden shifting education context caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, which eliminated the established plans for the teacher’s final practicum
The underlying question guiding this paper is: How do preservice teachers and ITE teacher educators understand the pedagogical mobility of graduating preservice teachers and their innovative pedagogical exploration against the background of teacher performance assessment expectations in the COVID-19 era? The paper conceptualizes pedagogical mobility as a sound knowledge of pedagogical positions and the capacity to adjust, adopt, and enact pedagogies with a context-consciousness (Du Plessis, 2020) to impact students’ learning within specific contextual requirements, and this question was explored using case study data
The investigation is guided by the research question, How do preservice teachers and ITE teacher educators understand the pedagogical mobility of graduating preservice teachers and innovative pedagogical exploration against the background of teacher performance assessment expectations in the COVID-19 era? The case study methodology allows for an immersive, close inspection of the situation so that participants’ experiences may become a tool for knowledge that potentially improves practice (Baron & McNeal, 2019)
Summary
This paper focuses on specific events that occurred for one graduating preservice teacher and an ITE educator after the sudden shifting education context caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and its lockdowns, which eliminated the established plans for the teacher’s final practicum. The case study is limited to a five-week period (October–November 2020), which was influenced by disruptive COVID-19 contexts of a rapid transformation from face-to-face teaching to online teaching during placement. This shift in pedagogical delivery impacted the preservice teacher’s altered practicum while being based off-shore in Malaysia. The online teaching environment and online mentoring/supervising of the practicum created an Published by Sciedu Press
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