Teacher educators’ experiences of the shift to remote teaching and learning due to COVID-19

Abstract

BACKGROUND: The measures imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic in early 2020 meant that many higher education institutions (HEIs) had to shift rapidly to remote teaching and learning (RTL). Given the unique demands of teacher education programmes, the question of the extent to which RTL and similar modes of teaching and learning are suited to the preparation of primary school teachers to teach in South African schools is an important one AIM: The aim of the study was to explore the experiences and perceptions of teacher educators (TEs) towards this rapid shift to RTL SETTING: The study took place in one department in a faculty of education in an urban South African university METHODS: This study took the form of a qualitative case study. Data was gathered by means semistructured individual interviews and focus group discussions RESULTS: Firstly, it was found that mixed responses to the change to RTL at the outset gave way to a general consensus about the long-term value of blended learning. Secondly, it was found that the change to RTL had a positive effect on TEs' teaching, given increased familiarity with, and integration of, technology, as well as the accompanying revisions to both pedagogy and curricula. Thirdly, the data showed that TEs perceived RTL as limiting because of two main factors, namely students' lack of information and communication technology (ICT) resources and because, in their estimation, teacher education uniquely requires contact teaching. Finally, it was found that the change to RTL created additional psychological stressors for both students and staff CONCLUSION: Based on this study's findings, the authors advocate for more recognition and support for the emotional work performed by TEs during times of transition. They also argue that TEs should be given more responsibility in moulding blended teaching and learning practices according to their experiences of the successes and challenges of RTL

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South African Journal of Childhood Educaon
ISSN: (Online) 2223-7682, (Print) 2223-7674
Page 1 of 10 Original Research
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Authors:
Sven H. Glietenberg1
Nadine Petersen1
Andy Carolin1
Aliaons:
1Department of Childhood
Educaon, Faculty of
Educaon, University of
Johannesburg, Johannesburg,
South Africa
Corresponding author:
Sven Glietenberg,
sven.glietenberg@gmail.com
Dates:
Received: 10 Feb. 2022
Accepted: 06 Sept. 2022
Published: 31 Oct. 2022
How to cite this arcle:
Glietenberg, S.H., Petersen, N.
& Carolin, A., 2022, ‘Teacher
educators’ experiences of the
shi to remote teaching and
learning due to COVID-19’,
South African Journal of
Childhood Educaon 12(1),
a1189. hps://doi.
org/10.4102/sajce.v12i1.1189
Copyright:
© 2022. The Authors.
Licensee: AOSIS. This work
is licensed under the
Creave Commons
Aribuon License.
Introducon
With the advent of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and its concomitant
lockdowns in March 2020, teacher educators (TEs) found themselves in a drastically changed
set of circumstances for teaching and learning. The shift to remote teaching and learning (RTL),
initially expected to last for 3 months, eventually lasted more than 18 months and colloquially
became known as the ‘new normal’. The prospect of teacher education one day reverting to its
previous mode of exclusively contact delivery now seems increasingly unlikely. The authors
argue that many of the changes associated with the shift to RTL – as unplanned and under-
resourced as some of them may have been – have led to unexpected improvements in teacher
education. At the same time, the shift to RTL has also led to the identification of a number of
challenges and limitations associated with teaching and learning entirely through information
and communication technologies (ICTs) – especially with regards to the project of teacher
education in South Africa. It is possible that these challenges and limitations may not always be
taken fully into account by higher education institutions (HEIs) and stakeholders, whose
priorities and competing demands are multiple. Thus, this article aims to highlight both the
affordances and the limitations of the shift to RTL, with the hope that this will contribute to
improvements in South African teacher education.
Background: The measures imposed to curb the spread of the coronavirus disease 2019
(COVID-19) pandemic in early 2020 meant that many higher education institutions (HEIs) had
to shift rapidly to remote teaching and learning (RTL). Given the unique demands of teacher
education programmes, the question of the extent to which RTL and similar modes of teaching
and learning are suited to the preparation of primary school teachers to teach in South African
schools is an important one.
Aim: The aim of the study was to explore the experiences and perceptions of teacher educators
(TEs) towards this rapid shift to RTL.
Setting: The study took place in one department in a faculty of education in an urban
South African university.
Methods: This study took the form of a qualitative case study. Data was gathered by means
semistructured individual interviews and focus group discussions.
Results: Firstly, it was found that mixed responses to the change to RTL at the outset gave way
to a general consensus about the long-term value of blended learning. Secondly, it was found
that the change to RTL had a positive effect on TEs’ teaching, given increased familiarity with,
and integration of, technology, as well as the accompanying revisions to both pedagogy and
curricula. Thirdly, the data showed that TEs perceived RTL as limiting because of two main
factors, namely students’ lack of information and communication technology (ICT) resources
and because, in their estimation, teacher education uniquely requires contact teaching. Finally,
it was found that the change to RTL created additional psychological stressors for both students
and staff.
Conclusion: Based on this study’s findings, the authors advocate for more recognition and
support for the emotional work performed by TEs during times of transition. They also argue
that TEs should be given more responsibility in moulding blended teaching and learning
practices according to their experiences of the successes and challenges of RTL.
Keywords: Teacher education; ICT in education; COVID-19; South Africa; education in the
Global South; work-integrated learning; remote teaching and learning; blended learning.
Teacher educators’ experiences of the shi to remote
teaching and learning due to COVID-19
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This article focuses on the experiences of a group of primary
school TEs regarding the shift to RTL, with the understanding
that how they adapted curricula and pedagogy can inform
the way that teacher education can continue to be reimagined
and redesigned. The central premise is that these changes
have the potential to both contribute positively to, and
detract from, the efforts to prepare teachers for South African
classrooms in the rapidly changing reality of the 21st century.
The article begins by briefly sketching the study’s context
and surveying some of the relevant literature in the field.
Thereafter, the research methodology is described and the
study’s findings are outlined. The article concludes with a
few recommendations for teacher education and research in
postpandemic contexts.
Contextual background to the study
When South Africa’s national COVID-19 lockdown was
initiated on 26 March 2020, academic staff at the university in
which this study was based were informed that teaching and
learning in the second term would take place fully online,
giving the lecturers less than a month in which to replan,
reorganise and redesign their teaching materials. Students
served by this university are typically from lower-middle
class or working-class backgrounds; tend to be first-
generation university entrants; and speak English as a
second, third or even fourth language (Van Zyl, Dampier &
Ngwenya 2020). The shift to RTL meant that students too had
to adapt quickly to a whole new mode of learning, often in
settings which were not conducive to learning, and sometimes
without even having access to the necessary technological
resources to do so effectively (Mabolloane 2021). To counteract
the latter challenge, the university made significant efforts to
negotiate with cellular network providers and ensured that
by the beginning of the new term, all students received a
mobile data allowance which would enable them to
connect to the Internet. Thousands of students who
needed laptops or smart devices were also supplied with
these at the university’s cost. Academic staff were offered a
series of workshops covering topics related to online
instruction, particularly with regards to using Blackboard,
the institution’s learning management system (LMS). They
were also provided with individual technical support from
learning design specialists.
The challenges and aordances of
the shi to remote teaching and
learning
This review of the literature begins by differentiating
between key terms that have been used to describe different
modes of teaching and learning that typically occur through
ICTs. The authors also argue for the importance of clearly
distinguishing between these modes, given the specific
affordances and limitations attached to each. Remote
teaching and learning has been defined as a ‘temporary shift
of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to
crisis circumstances’ (Hodges et al. 2020). Thus, the mode of
teaching and learning that occurred in the vast majority of
the world’s HEIs at the beginning of the pandemic can most
appropriately be referred to as RTL and not online teaching
and learning (OTL). While OTL is a systematically planned
and appropriately resourced initiative for ‘instruction
delivered on a digital device that is intended to support
learning’ (Ferri, Grifoni & Guzzo 2020), RTL is more of a
‘stopgap measure’ to deal with an emergency of some kind
which makes ‘normal’, face-to-face teaching and learning
impossible (Hodges et al. 2020).
Remote teaching and learning is the mode of teaching and
learning that teacher education at the institution in which
this study was based was forced to shift to at the beginning
of the pandemic. However, as time progressed, approaches
that were initially of an emergency nature were consolidated
and improved upon with each successive academic term.
The emergency responses resultantly became increasingly
formalised and better suited for exploiting the opportunities
and navigating the limitations of the changed (and indeed
still changing) circumstances. Thus, it is argued that what
had begun as RTL in March 2020 was morphing, in
piecemeal fashion, into OTL. In addition, as school-based
work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunities and limited
face-to-face learning sessions resumed in 2021, teacher
education was beginning to transition to a form of blended
learning, which is defined as ‘the thoughtful fusion of face-
to-face and online learning experiences’ (Garrison &
Vaughan 2008:5).
In this next section, the main issues in teacher education since
the beginning of the pandemic are addressed, and the
responses are differentiated between the Global North and
the Global South. The first issue is the loss of in-person
interaction in traditional face-to-face lecture venues, which
was one of the most obvious consequences of the shift to
RTL. The authors’ claim is that the ability of TEs to maintain
some semblance of the social interaction of contact teaching
and learning was limited by their and their students’ access
to the basic technological resources (such as electricity,
Internet connectivity and digital devices) needed to work
online. In an article penned for the popular press, Black
(2020) argued that ‘learning through technology’ was not a
sustainable solution for most students in South Africa, chiefly
because of their home environments, which were not always
conducive for learning. Others, like O’Regan (2021), reporting
on South African students’ responses, indicated that many
simply did not manage to cope with the shift to RTL because
of the overwhelming technical barriers and were thus forced
to drop out. In light of this, and citing the challenges faced by
students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, as well as
the institutional challenges faced by historically black
universities in transitioning to a new mode of teaching and
learning, academics at some universities even called for the
academic year to be cancelled or at least put on hold (C19
Post School Education Working Group of the People’s
Coalition 2020; UCT Black Academic Caucus 2020). This did
not seem to be taken up by the majority of HEIs, and many
soldiered on.

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An important part of face-to-face teaching is the pedagogical
value of in-person contact, in which relationships are crucial.
For instance, Black (2020) contended that: ‘[t]he recurrent
theme in teacher training and support is simple: effective
teaching and learning is about relationships […] It is, at its
core, social’. For the authors, this component is vital because
TEs are often encouraged to ‘walk the talk’ (Guilfoyle 1995)
by modelling many of the ‘engaging’ classroom teaching
practices that they expect students to learn (Loughran &
Berry 2005). These teaching practices often foreground the
importance of fostering conducive relationships for learning,
both among learners and between teacher and learners.
The importance of maintaining conducive relationships with
stakeholders – between student teachers and TEs, among TEs
and their colleagues and among student teachers and their
peers – was also a common theme addressed in much of the
literature reviewed that focused on the shift to RTL in teacher
education in the Global North (Baran & Alzoubi 2020; Scull
et al. 2020). Linked to this was the importance of collaboration.
Darling-Hammond and Hyler (2020) cited the increase in
collaboration, both among different teacher education
providers and between teacher education providers and
schools, as one of the most promising changes that has
occurred since teacher education was ‘forced online’ as a
result of the COVID-19 outbreak. They go on to state that
‘this moment of disruption has created the opportunity for
rethinking and reinventing [teacher] preparation’ (Darling-
Hammond & Hyler 2020:7). As encouraging as this stance is,
it is also subject to the underlying material reality that
countries in the Global North generally benefit from an
advanced baseline level of technological infrastructure which
was already present before the pandemic (Robinson et al.
2020:10). Put simply: it is easier to stay positive in the face of
unforeseen challenges if you know you have adequate tools
and resources to deal with those challenges. Moreover, social
interaction and collaboration through technology are easier
to facilitate if everyone has access to reliable devices, Internet
connections and electricity.
One tool which TEs in the Global North used to maintain
social interaction with their students during the shift to RTL
were regular synchronous ‘web conferences’ (Dyment &
Downing 2018) – Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings in
current parlance. Prepandemic research shows that
synchronous web conferences may indeed go some way in
humanising the experience of online learning and reducing
the feelings of isolation often associated with online learning
(Croft, Dalton & Grant 2010). Falloon (2011:206) cautioned,
however, that they may also have the unintended negative
consequence of reducing students’ feelings of autonomy and
ability to interact with learning materials on their own terms.
This limitation is especially important to consider in contexts
like South Africa where, as has been mentioned, students
often suffer from a lack of sufficient access to the requisite
technological resources needed to learn through technology
(Black 2020; Mabolloane 2021). Carrillo and Flores (2020:13)
argued that the realities of ‘digital inequality’ – unequal
access to technological devices and differences in digital
literacy (Beaunoyer, Dupéré & Guitton 2020) – need to be
addressed as an urgent priority, so as to ‘maximise students’
participation in their learning process’. It is clear that a
nuanced understanding of the context of one’s students has
been just as important in the shift to RTL as it is in face-to-face
teaching and learning, as it enables TEs to make changes that
are most conducive to their students’ academic success.
The second major issue facing teacher education during this
time concerns the pedagogical and curricular changes that
TEs, both in the Global North and South, had to make in the
wake of the pandemic, in particular adapting teaching and
assessing. Many studies from the Global North (see, e.g.
König, Jäger-Biela & Glutsch 2020; Moorhouse 2020)
indicated that the shift to RTL showed that both student
teachers and TEs were in need of opportunities to
develop more sophisticated digital knowledge and skills.
Assessment, particularly, was one area in which TEs were
compelled to adapt their traditional practices in order to
respond to the significantly changed circumstances of RTL
(Baran & Alzoubi 2020; Quezada,Talbot & Quezada-Parker
2020; Scull et al. 2020). La Velle et al. (2020) suggested that
the drastic change in practices ‘triggered a fundamental
review of what is really important and what is actually
possible’ – something which, they argue, was much needed.
The authors of the present study concur. This view is also
advanced by Ellis, Steadman and Mao (2020) who
maintained that a number of specific changes in practice
that went along with the overall embrace of technology
across the institutions they surveyed could genuinely be
classed as innovations, ‘because they added value [authors’
emphasis] to previous historical practices rather than
just offering an emergency “sticking plaster” to a sudden
“hole”’ (Ellis et al. 2020:11).
This seems to echo Darling-Hammond and Hyler’s (2020)
optimistic view of the pandemic’s overall effects on teacher
education. Teacher educators from the Global South, and
South Africa in particular, also made significant adaptations
to their traditional teaching and curriculum to suit
the extraordinary circumstances they were presented
with. Iyer (2020), for example, made extensive use of
online discussion forums to facilitate collaboration and
information sharing between students, while Godsell
(2020) used WhatsApp as her primary site for teaching,
while developing a series of formative assessments which
had students exhibit their understanding of the course
content in highly creative ways. Halsall (2020) found that
reaching out to colleagues for support and creating more
explicit boundaries with students helped to ameliorate
some of the pressures of working under the often stressful
circumstances of RTL.
A final issue affecting teacher education during this time
concerned the question of how to best address students’
practical teaching periods when schools were closed or
operating under stricter protocols to curb infections. While
some TEs from the Global North did highlight the reduction in
opportunities for practical teaching experience as a cause for

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concern (La Velle et al. 2020), this turned out to be a more
significant dilemma for teacher education in the Global South
(Kalloo, Mitchell & Kamalodeen 2020; Moyo 2020; Robinson &
Rusznyak 2020; Sepúlveda-Escobar & Morrison 2020). In most
countries in the Global South, the average WIL placement
schools were not able to rapidly ‘pivot’ online and thus still
were largely unable to provide opportunities for student
teachers to complete this important part of their training.
Robinson and Rusznyak (2020), reflecting on the South
African context specifically, distinguished between the lost
opportunities for practical teaching experience in terms of
both ‘situational’ and ‘relational’ learning, with situational
learning referring to the learning that comes from being
exposed to different school contexts and having to adapt
one’s teaching to suit these contexts (p. 3) and relational
learning referring to an awareness that teaching is embedded
in human relationships and in the complex interplay between
teacher, learner, content and context (p. 4). The sector-wide
response in South Africa in the form of the ‘Teacher Choices
in Action’ module (Robinson and Rusznyak 2020:7) for all
final-year student teachers – including students registered in
the department where this study has been conducted – in lieu
of the full practical teaching experience components of their
degrees, proved to be an exceedingly valuable innovation
(Robinson & Rusznyak 2020). This is one example of how
innovations on established practices were initiated in the
context of COVID-19. It is clear from the literature reviewed
that TEs have been at the forefront of grappling with the
extraordinary changes that teacher education has had to
undergo since the beginning of the pandemic. Within this
context of continuing and rapid change, it is all the more
important for the voices of the TEs to be heard.
Research methods
This study took the form of a qualitative case study, as
the authors were interested in exploring the ‘bounded
system (or case)’ of TEs in one primary school teacher
education programme ‘over time through detailed, in-depth
data collection involving multiple sources of information’
(Creswell et al. 2007:245). The case in question was bounded
by two main factors: the fact that all the TEs who participated
were working within the same department and the fact that
data were collected within a specific time frame, namely over
the course of 1 year, with two specific data collection points.
Data were generated from 15 TEs with varied years of
experience in the field. Table 1 provides some detail.
Data generation was conducted at two points over a
12-month period: the first in July 2020, 3 months after the
beginning of the change to RTL, and the second in July 2021.
At the first point, semistructured individual interviews
were conducted with all participants, each interview
ranging from 30 minutes and one hour in duration. At the
second point, focus group discussions with between two
and four participants were conducted. These discussions
enabled the researchers to ascertain which issues from the
first point of data collection were still prevalent and whether
any issues had changed significantly over the course of the
intervening year. Interviews and focus group discussions
were transcribed and analysed by means of an adapted
version of the constant comparative method, as described
by Maykut and Morehouse (1994), using the ATLAS.ti
qualitative data analysis software. Figure 1 to Figure 3
provide examples of how raw data was analysed and
reduced to usable information.
Ethical consideraons
Ethical clearance to conduct this study was obtained from the
University of Johannesburg Faculty of Education Research
Ethics Committee (ref. no. Sem 2-2020-047).
Results and discussion
From the analysis of data, four themes emerged: Teacher
educators’ initial mixed responses to the change to RTL gave
way to a general consensus about the long-term value of
blended learning. The shift to RTL seems to have had a
TABLE 1: Demographic details of teacher educators parcipang in study.
Teacher
educator
Focus group
(phase two)
Subjects teaching Total years of experience
in teacher educaon at
a university
Total years of experience
as teachers in primary or
secondary educaon
Age range (years)
TE1 1 Language educaon 720 (primary) 40–50
TE2 1 Teaching methodology and teaching studies 6 2 (primary) 30–40
TE3 1 Teaching methodology and teaching studies 730 (primary) 40–50
TE4 1 Language educaon 10 5 (secondary) 30–40
TE5 2 Mathemacs 30 8 (secondary) > 60
TE6 2 Social sciences 4 2 (secondary) < 30
TE7 2 Teaching studies 2 5 (secondary) < 30
TE8 3 Teaching methodology and language educaon 4 3 (primary) 30–40
TE9 3 Science and technology and teaching methodology 4 8 (secondary) 30–40
TE10 3 Teaching methodology 2 3 months (primary) < 30
TE11 4 Teaching methodology and language educaon 36 3 (secondary) > 60
TE12 4 Social sciences and teaching methodology 6 10 (primary) 40–50
TE13 - Mathemacs 30 8 (secondary) > 60
TE14 - Creave arts and teaching studies 77 (primary) 30–40
TE15 - Teaching studies 3 0 30–40
TE, Teacher educator.

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positive effect on TEs’ teaching, given their increased
familiarity with and integration of technology and
accompanying revisions to both pedagogy and curricula.
Remote teaching and learning was, however, perceived as
limiting because of students’ lack of ICT resources and
because teacher education uniquely requires contact
teaching. In addition, the change to RTL created additional
psychological stressors for both students and staff that were
challenging to manage.
Mixed inial responses gave way to consensus
about the long-term value of blended learning
Unsurprisingly, TEs initially had a range of reactions to the
change to RTL, from fear, on the one hand, to excitement at
the opportunity to learn new things, on the other. Notably,
TEs who had already begun to experiment with technology-
based teaching generally perceived the change as less intense
than their colleagues. A big issue was the suddeness of the
change. The abrupt discontinuation of physical contact with
students and colleagues was described in vivid terms as
follows:
‘[S]o that was the one of the biggest challenges for me – this
almost severing of ties with students that you see on a weekly
basis. It was like you cut the umbilical cord […].’ (TE3 Ph1:1)
In these references: ‘TE’ refers to the specific Teacher
Educator who was interviewed, ‘Ph’ refers to the data
gathering phase from which this excerpt stems (either phase
1 or 2) and the final number refers to the page number in the
transcript.
This description, which evokes images of the physical
separation of a mother from her newborn child, speaks to
the close bond that many TEs have with their students. It
also evidences TEs’ recognition of students’ vulnerability –
TEs are very often the first point of contact for students on
campus who are experiencing challenges. Under RTL
conditions, TEs’ misgivings and feelings of anxiety around
the change to technology-based learning were exacerbated.
In particular, students’ descriptions of home environments
unconducive for learning tended to be internalised by the
lecturers, not dissimilar to what has been reported on by
other researchers (Dube 2020; Godsell 2020; Sepúlveda-
Escobar and Morrison 2020). Teacher educators also
expressed concern for students’ ability to make the ‘mind-
shift’ (TE8, Ph1, p. 9) to a new way of learning when ‘[t]heir
entire schooling system was so vastly different from what
they had to now engage with’ (TE3 Ph1:13). Another TE
similarly observed that ‘the responsibility for learning [is
now] mostly on the learner, more than the person who is
teaching’ (TE1 Ph1:7).
However, after more than a year of teaching remotely, there
was evidence of shifts in TEs’ experiences and perceptions of
the change to RTL. For instance, the discourse changed from
feeling as though they were ‘grappling in the dark’ (TE13
Ph1:1) to feeling more confident – both of their students’
ability to learn independently and of their own ability to
provide quality instruction through the mode of RTL.
Teacher educators hinted at a shift from being ‘knowledge
transmitter[s]’ to ‘knowledge facilitator[s]’ (Regan et al.
2012), and the resultant onus placed on students to take on a
more active role in their own learning is a key affordance of
RTL which can potentially be leveraged for a more sustainable
shift to blended learning beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.
By year two of RTL, some kind of equilibrium had been
reached. Almost everyone had by then managed to adapt to
the new mode of teaching and learning, and there was
clear recognition that RTL had catalysed some valuable
innovations. Several TEs shared a desire to ‘marry the
FIGURE 1: Example of a code being allocated to an excerpt of text.

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affordances of online teaching with what you would do in a
lecture’ (TE2 Ph2:1), with another TE noting that she wanted
to ‘keep working to find what works best and use the tools of
RTL as just that: tools. If they’re not working, chuck them’
(TE4 Ph2:2). This pragmatic, learning-focused approach is
suggestive of what Cook (2018:73) described as ‘the need to
put the pedagogy ahead of the technology’. It is also resonant
with Baran and Alzoubi’s (2020) ‘human-centred design
approach’, which foregrounds the importance of using
technology in a way that is aligned with students’ preferences,
capabilities and resources.
The change to remote teaching and learning had
a posive eect on teacher educators’ teaching
Another key theme that was identified was that the change
to RTL had a positive effective on TEs’ teaching, given their
increased familiarity with and integration of technology
and the accompanying revision to both pedagogy and
FIGURE 2: Example of the constuent codes that make up a code group.
WIL, work-integrated learning; RTL, remote teaching and learning; F2F, face-to-face.
FIGURE 3: Example of the composion of a category and its subcategories.
2.1.4
Concern for first
years (4)
5.1.2 (Lack of) praccals,
pracce teaching, WIL etc.
(27) 2
5.1.1 (RTL goes against)
natural teaching (55)
Category 6:
Limitaons to the quality of teacher educaon associated with
the nature of RTL
5.1.2.1 Praccals, pracce
teaching, WI L etc. -
Theory/pracce balance in
teacher Ed (9)
5.1.2.2 Praccals,
pracce teaching, WIL etc. -
no praccals is liming
(14)
5.1.1.1 Natural
teaching-interacon
(32)
5.1.1.5 Natural
teaching-comparing
online and F2F (6)
5.1.3 Compressing
content (16)
5.1.1.4 Natural
teaching-personalizing
(4)
5.1.1.2 Natural
teaching-feedback (7)
5.1.1.3 Natural teaching
- facial expressions and
body language (4)

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curricula. This is significant, given that the issue of student
engagement was a critical one throughout the change to
RTL, not only for the TEs who participated in this study but
for other TEs as well, both in the Global South (e.g. Godsell
2020) and Global North (e.g. Scull et al. 2020). As TE1 (Ph1:7)
put it:
‘[T]hey are just not participating the way they would participate
when I was teaching face-to-face […] your lecture is very one-
way. It’s you, the lecturer, talking and talking and talking.’ (TE1
Ph1:7)
Many TEs participating in the study adapted to the
limitations of the circumstances in order to find ways of
engaging students by, for example, reworking curriculum
content so that it could be presented more succinctly through
the new mediums that they now used most frequently to
deliver content, like WhatsApp messages and PowerPoint
slides containing voice-over recordings. This process helped
the TEs ‘see [their] subject quite clearly in terms of what the
students needed to take away from it, what the non-
negotiables were’ (TE4 Ph1:1).
Pedagogic affordances also arose from the increased use of
and familiarity with technological tools. WhatsApp became
the pivotal ‘enabler, the channel’ (TE5 Ph2:7) that kept TEs
and students connected even in the face of the perennial
problem of limited data. What Zoom did for TEs in the Global
North, by providing them with a medium through which
to more intimately connect with students and give them
one-on-one support (Quezada et al. 2020), WhatsApp did for
the data-inhibited TEs in much of the Global South. Some
TEs even reported that it enabled them to form ‘more
personal’ (TE2 Ph1:3) relationships with students than had
previously been the case when they had been limited to
interacting with students face-to-face and via e-mail. Teacher
educators also reported that they were adopting a more
consistent routine in structuring their weekly learning
materials on Blackboard, the university’s LMS, which made
them feel more organised and see ‘a lot more engagement
with the content as a result’ (TE2 Ph2:1). Making more
effective use of the capabilities of Blackboard to ‘track’ (TE9
Ph2:4) individual students’ progress also enabled them to
more efficiently follow up on those students who were falling
behind and provide them with extra support.
Apart from their increased and more sophisticated use of
WhatsApp and Blackboard, TEs also made use of other
digital tools to enrich students’ learning. Similar to the
experiences of other TEs globally (Baran & Alzoubi 2020; La
Velle et al. 2020; Quezada et al. 2020), assessment of students’
learning, for example, was an area in which the increased use
of technological tools led to some valuable innovations.
Although there were certainly areas in which many TEs still
felt that students’ engagement was mostly ‘surface-level’
(TE8 Ph2:4), the following sentiment expressed by TE6 aptly
sums up the various positive impacts that the change to RTL
had on TEs’ teaching and gives further credence to the
argument (see, e.g. Ellis et al. 2020; Darling-Hammond &
Hyler 2020) that the pandemic was a catalyst for positive
transformation in the field as a whole:
‘Lecturers and students have become more open-minded around
education. It has allowed us to grow and think more critically
about how our teaching benefits the students and how to enable
good learning.’ (TE6 Ph2:3)
Remote teaching and learning was perceived as
liming
The third significant theme that emerged was the perception
that RTL was limiting because of students’ lack of ICT
resources and because teacher education uniquely requires
contact teaching. Despite the university’s significant efforts to
ameliorate students’ resource-based challenges, according to
TEs, a significant number of students did not have access to
the basic resources required to learn remotely. Teacher
educators spoke of students who were doing all their
assignments on a smartphone, who had to ‘walk several
kilometers to get to a tree where they get signal’ (TE4 Ph1:2)
or who were ‘living in a home with many family members,
many children … living in one room’ (TE15 Ph1:6). Studies
from the Global North (Baran & Alzoubi 2020; Hadar et al.
2020; Roman 2020) also show that TEs experienced feelings of
concern for students’ psychological well-being and ability to
cope academically. However, for the most part, they did not
express concern that students would be completely shut off from
continuing to engage in crucial parts of their studies because
of a lack of resources – as did TEs in this specific department
and elsewhere in the Global South (Dube 2020; Moyo 2020).
A second factor that caused TEs to perceive RTL as limiting
was that TEs found the lack of opportunities for any type of
face-to-face teaching and learning ultimately irreconcilable
with the project of teacher education for South Africa – given
the important role of modelling in initial teacher education
(ITE) (Guilfoyle 1995; Loughran & Berry 2005) and the fact
that the majority of local teaching contexts that students
would work in after graduating would require experience
in traditional, face-to-face, in-classroom teaching. Teacher
educators found that their own teaching, disembodied and
occurring at a physical and often temporal distance from
their students, lacked the ‘element of human connection […]
that is absorbed the more that they interact with their
lecturers’ (TE3 Ph2:2). This further hampered their efforts to
serve as an effective model for their students.
From the beginning of RTL in April 2020 until the end of
2021, students could not engage in as many traditional, in-
classroom practical teaching experiences. Teacher educators
considered this lack of practical teaching experiences as a
limitation to their students’ teacher education, as it prevented
students both from having opportunities to practise teaching
and to observe more experienced teachers in action. This is
consistent with similar research in the Global South (Moyo
2020; Robinson & Rusznyak 2020; Sepúlveda-Escobar &
Morrison 2020), which raised concerns about a more
circumscribed practical component of teacher education.

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Among the TEs in this study, the concern was heightened by
the fact that, as TE8 (Ph2:4) explained: ‘There is still a backlog
to get face-to-face teaching right’. Indeed, although TEs
frequently commented on the value of the technological skills
students were acquiring during this time, they also remained
concerned that the experience of learning to teach through
RTL was not preparing students sufficiently for ‘the context
they are going to find’ (TE8 Ph2:4) upon graduating – in other
words, for teaching face-to-face in the often decidedly ‘low-
tech’ classrooms of average South African public schools.
The change to remote teaching and learning
created addional psychological stressors for
both students and sta
Although many TEs found value in reworking their
curriculum to address the limitations imposed by RTL, they
experienced psychological pressure from having to contend
with competing imperatives: responding to the realities of
students’ contextual barriers to learning on the one hand,
while still maintaining the standards and integrity of the
programme on the other. Overall, this put TEs into an often
frustrating position in which they felt that they were ‘stuck
between achieving our graduate attributes or educational
goals, and humanity or being human’ (TE7 Ph2:3) or as TE9
(Ph2:4) poetically put it, ‘between the deep blue sea and a rock’.
Adding to this psychological pressure that TEs were under to
counter a perceived ‘drop in standards’, while remaining
sensitive to and supportive of students’ challenges, was the
fact that they were being inundated by students with requests
for help of various kinds – sometimes with issues over which
they had no power. There is a sense in which TEs, in addition
to performing their educational duties, often ended up
‘carrying’ a lot of the ‘extra weight’ of the various challenges
students were facing, challenges associated not only with
learning but with living during this difficult time. ‘This is the
“heaviness” that we have to carry’, as TE5 (Ph2:2) puts it. At
least two other studies (Hadar et al. 2020; Roman 2020)
described similar situations in which TEs were confronted
with the extra responsibility of dealing with students’
psychological and existential challenges. Hadar et al.’s study,
in fact, linked the two issues of curricular trimming and
dealing with student challenges, stating that TEs shifted their
‘curricular focus from a subject-matter orientation to one that
concerns students’ well-being’ (Hadar et al. 2020:9).
This ‘heaviness’ or ‘secondary burden’ that TEs experienced
contributed to TEs’ perception that RTL had caused them to
take on a significantly increased workload. If England and
Farkas’s (1986:91) formulation of ‘emotional work’ is
considered as efforts ‘to understand others, to have empathy
with their situation, to feel their feelings as part of one’s
own’, then TEs’ perception that their workload had increased
during the change to RTL is understandable. Moreover, an
increase in screen-time and a paucity of human interaction
resulted in TEs experiencing a preponderance of the stressful,
difficult elements of their job over many of the more positive,
stimulating or enriching ones.
There was a prevailing sense among the TEs that while
management might have been aware of the efforts they were
making to continue with their academic responsibilities
during the change to RTL, management was perhaps not
equally aware of the additional emotional work that TEs
were increasingly engaged with – in other words, the
‘challenge to rethink and reconstruct your entire life [while]
bearing the brunt of students’ frustration’ (TE3 Ph1:5) – and
the toll that it was taking on their psychological well-being.
Indeed, as Isenbarger and Zembylas (2006:123) stated:
‘Emotional work involves many emotional costs, and is
often invisible, unacknowledged, or devalued’. Despite
acknowledging that management was forthcoming with
technical support and, in some cases, even modelling what
might be considered a more ‘human-centred’ approach
(Baran & Alzoubi 2020) – by, for example, the departmental
head giving all staff personal ‘check-in’ calls to enquire
about their well-being – TEs generally found that institutional
stakeholders typically did not contribute to the alleviation of
the additional stressors that they were experiencing or in
some cases even may have contributed to the exacerbation
of these.
Conclusion
Although the circumstances were often challenging and
chaotic, and TEs exhibited a range of responses to coping
with these circumstances, upon analysing the data collected
over the course of more than a year of RTL, a number of
common themes in TEs’ experiences and perceptions
emerged. Firstly, there was an overwhelming consensus
among TEs regarding the desirability of moving towards a
more blended mode of teaching and learning as soon as
possible. This would take advantage of the many affordances
and innovations that had come with the change to RTL –
above all, the increased familiarity with technological tools
and the opportunity for TEs to redesign their curricula. This
more blended approach would also aim to avoid the
constraints and limitations of RTL – particularly the fact
that it lacked any opportunities for face-to-face instruction
and modelling by TEs, as well as opportunities for students
to engage in practical teaching experiences in real
classrooms. The issue of additional psychological stressors
for TEs that accompanied the change to RTL because of a
higher demand for psychosocial support from students was
a major concern. Despite institutional support, the authors
of the present study are concerned that that there may have
sometimes been insufficient acknowledgment of the
emotional work performed by TEs during this time. That
TEs did not feel adequately supported is problematic. The
forms of support required by TEs working under such
conditions are something that institutions will need to look
into closely; support should not simply be a verbal
acknowledgment, but it should include psychological
support resources, as well as concrete changes to TEs’
working conditions, such as more time in their schedules to
address the immediate challenges and to develop strategies
to mitigate them.

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Teacher educators have a nuanced view of what transpired in
the change to RTL, both because of their proximity to students
and because they have been the ones most responsible for
ensuring the continuation of teaching and learning. They thus
have important perspectives about which elements of RTL
can contribute to – or detract from – the creation of conditions
conducive for student teachers’ university education. The
authors recommend that more opportunities be created for
TEs to collaborate on the conceptualisation of future reforms
to teacher education in the wake of their experiences of RTL.
Teacher educators should, in the authors’ opinion, not simply
be commenting on ideas that come to them ‘from above’ as it
were, but rather, they should be taking a much more active
role in generating these ideas themselves.
The authors are also of the view that further research should
be conducted into TEs’ successes and challenges as they
move into a more blended mode of teaching and learning – as
this will continue to lead to genuine innovations in the field
of teacher education – and not just ‘sticking plasters’ to
continue patching the holes that were created by the sudden
shift to RTL. Teacher educators’ workloads need to take into
account the time and resources that are necessary in order to
maximise the advantages of collaboration among different
stakeholders.
This study has several significant implications for teacher
education programmes, both immediate and future focused.
Firstly, the shift to RTL resulted in students being trained in
how to prepare and execute online lessons, as well as how to
experiment with and repurpose different mobile apps for
online teaching. Secondly, the shift to RTL allowed staff to
finetune the remote assessment of WIL via the submission of
online recordings of students’ teaching. While not replacing
WIL assessments in school settings by academic staff, this
shift has created the opportunity for variance in the mode of
conducting and assessing WIL, and it is likely to include
applications that leverage other technological platforms such
as virtual and augmented reality in the future. Thirdly,
students were exposed to more rigorous assessment practices
as formative and summative assessments increasingly
required students to demonstrate the application of knowledge
and not just reproduce specific information. Finally, the shift
to RTL resulted in the modelling for students of how to adapt
to shifting and uncertain teaching and learning environments.
Given how the uncertainty created by pandemics and societal
disruptions impact on education, the authors are of the view
that these implications are significant for the development of
adaptive expertise and competencies that are necessary for
teachers to work in an ever-changing world.
In conclusion, the authors feel that while RTL should not be
conflated with carefully planned and adequately resourced
OTL, the experience of RTL as catalysed by the COVID-19
pandemic has given teacher educators an opportunity to
learn important lessons that can improve modes of teaching
and learning that make extensive use of ICTs, like OTL and
blended learning, in the long term. If the lessons of the
experience of RTL are not reflected upon, there is a danger
that creating the conditions most conducive for students’
learning may be diluted or lost. Thus, it is important, as
teacher education is slowly reimagined, redesigned and
repurposed for a postpandemic world, that the experiences
and perceptions of the TEs who were on the frontlines of the
change to RTL be considered carefully.
Acknowledgements
Compeng interests
The authors have declared that no competing interest exists.
Authors’ contribuons
This article is based on master’s research conducted by S.H.G.
under the supervision of N.P. and A.C. All authors were
involved in the conceptualisation of the research. S.H.G. was
responsible for data generation and analysis. S.H.G. also wrote
the first draft of this article, while N.P. and A.C. revised it.
Funding informaon
This research received no specific grant from any funding
agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Data availability
The data collected is subject to the university’s ethical
clearance guidelines.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of
the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or
position of any affiliated agency of the authors, and the
publisher.
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