Abstract
The Covid-19 pandemic caused many sudden social changes, including a shift to remote education in many countries. In Finland, remote education also concerns crafts as a standard school subject, combining aspects of art, design, textile, and technology in basic education. Accordingly, Finnish craft teachers faced the unprecedented situation of teaching remotely a subject, which often involves hands-on activities with tangible tools and materials. The present study explores how craft pedagogy has been adapted to remote education by looking at the opportunities and challenges it faces and the effects on classroom interaction. The data consist of the output of two webinars (i.e. 27 group assignments from 123 participants) organised in the autumn of 2020 and targeted at craft teachers and student craft teachers at various levels of the education system. The qualitative, data-driven content analysis reveals that remote teaching provides beneficial opportunities for involving students’ everyday lives and families in craft education. However, challenges exist relating to the unequal distribution of materials, as well as technical and social resources at different levels of education and in various contexts. Our study also finds that remote teaching is more teacher-centred and task-oriented than classroom interaction. Online teaching facilities allow teachers to provide students with more individual feedback but make maintaining students’ peer interaction difficult. Although remote craft education was considered very challenging at first, teachers have managed to create useful pedagogical practices to be utilised in and beyond the era of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Highlights
IntroductionOnline teaching and learning mostly offered alternative ways of studying
Prior to the pandemic, online teaching and learning mostly offered alternative ways of studying
As Aguilera and Nightengale-Lee (2020) recognised, the best results are not reached by replicating the existing social practices of classroom pedagogy but by establishing new, more flexible practices for undertaking teaching and learning for the purposes of remote education. In line with these studies, the findings of our study indicate that the pandemic caused craft teachers to create new pedagogical solutions and approaches, such as establishing new digital skills and feedback practices via online platforms, developing a wide range of learning topics centred around sustainability and household, and delivering virtual workshops and classes to sustain collaboration among teachers, 328 the effects of remote pandemic education on crafts pedagogy that might be worth keeping up in the post-pandemic era
Summary
Online teaching and learning mostly offered alternative ways of studying. Previous studies have recognised that online education operated from a distance has been crucial in providing education to remote places with few students or in offering courses on specific topics not available for many learners otherwise Iivari et al, 2020; Niemi & Kousa, 2020) This sudden shift has been called ‘emergency remote teaching and learning’ (ERT) and ‘pandemic education’ (Hodges et al, 2020; Milman, 2020). We use ‘remote’ education to refer to the teaching and learning of crafts utilising virtual and digital means in a way that is not necessarily online all the time (Ilomäki & Lakkala, 2020) or ‘distant’ in the sense of attempting to reach faraway places (Øgaard, 2018). We use ‘pandemic’ to refer to the situation caused by the Covid-19 crisis
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