The Unforgotten Pre-service Teachers [Participants]: Did the Pandemic Affect Learning While on Practicum? What Uncompleted Pre-service Teachers’ Mentoring Experiences [Data] Can Tell Us

Abstract

AbstractIn education, practical, experiential, or experimental research is usually based on a number of participants from whom we collect data. We contact them and explain their role in the study and ask them to kindly devote their time to us. Our final dataset (data “useful for our research”) is a portion of our data corpus (all data collected). The story we finally print is the one from the dataset purposefully selected from the data corpus. The myriad of reasons given for not including some of our participants’ data in the dataset include the following: participants’ lack of enthusiasm, punctuality, timely delivery of audio recorded data, or data quality. The pandemic outbreak impacted my participants’ lives, workplaces, and studies. Their practicum experience was impacted too, so some of them could not complete their own teaching rounds. As a consequence, they could not provide enough data to analyse in order to answer my research questions. They tried, but it was not possible for some of them. However, all the data collected, my data corpus, is valuable to me as a teacher educator and as a mentor teacher. This is a twofold story: my participants’ troubles and commitment during their practicum, and my own troubles collecting data while not neglecting what my unselected participants did for me. The pandemic’s devastating effects in teacher education programmes in Chile is affecting pre-service teachers’ practicum experience, their relationship with their students and their relationship with their mentor teachers, both university-based tutors and school-based mentors. Knowing the needs and experiences of pre-service teachers who did not get a completed experience in their allocated university-partner schools may help us to better navigate the practicum experience in the present times.KeywordsMentoringPracticum experienceMentor teachersCOVID-19Qualitative researchResearch methods