Teacher identity and pedagogy: strategies and responses of teacher educators during the covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

This small-scale qualitative research project is located within post-compulsory education in England and explores some of the strategies and responses employed by three initial teacher educators to carry out their professional role while responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. The central argument is that teacher identity was significant as a pedagogical tool to respond to the pandemic. Therefore, more consideration should be given to the interconnectedness of who I am, what I do and why I do it, when pedagogical responses are needed to address emergent issues. The first part of the paper paints a picture of the available literature related to learning during covid-19, followed by an articulation of the research design. The second part discusses the relationship between identity and pedagogy, which is the central theme constructed from the data gathered from the research participants. It closes with a reflection about how educators as a collective have shown resilience and creative ways to deal with challenges, thus adding new layers of their identity, and this can be pedagogically powerful.

KEYWORDS:

• Covid-19
• pandemic
• identity
• teaching
• pedagogy
• teacher education

1. Introduction

This small-scale qualitative research project is located within post-compulsory education in England and explores some of the strategies and responses employed by three initial teacher educators to carry out their role while responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a teacher educator, I am interested in the learning from our individual and collective experience from significant events, which includes not only the challenges of lockdowns but also those of returning to education in-person post-lockdown. I argue that these challenging times have started small but important transformations in our ways of living and doing education. There are valuable experiences that we need to start articulating for our future practice and that of other educators.

The first part of this paper presents a brief overview of some of the available literature around teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, followed by an outline of the research design adopted to address the research question: What strategies and responses informed HE teachers’ pedagogical approaches to teach online during the COVID-19 pandemic? The second part presents an account of the findings and a discussion of the relationship between identity and pedagogy, which is the central theme constructed from the data gathered from the research participants. The central claim of this paper is that teacher identity was significant when trying to understand how educators responded to the COVID-19 pandemic. There is an emerging body of literature documenting the experiences, challenges, and reflections from teachers about their professional practice during Covid-19, discussed below. Regarding the student experience, mostly in compulsory education, Goudeau et al. (2021) and Hasan et al. (2021) argue that remote learning and lockdowns during COVID-19 not only negatively impacted the educational outcomes of disadvantaged students but exacerbated inequalities due in part to the ‘digital divide’ (Schweitzer 2019). However, there is a gap in the literature around teacher education for the post-compulsory education sector and how educators’ values and identities were significant for the type of decisions required to respond to an emergent and serious issue such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

The relationship between our personal identity, role as educators and contextual factors, determine our pedagogical approaches to learning. The pandemic required all educators to make important decisions, and as will be discussed below, the values, beliefs and professional identity of my participants shaped their strategies and responses to the pandemic. As Mockler (2011, 522) suggests, the articulation of one’s identity is ‘a first step towards theorising professional practice through the explicit linking of ‘what I do’ with ‘why I am here’. This foregrounds my claim to the need to investigate the relationship between identity and pedagogy, especially when dealing with critical situations. Extending Dewey’s (1897, 80) vision of education ‘engaged, not simply in the training of individuals, but in the formation of the proper social life’, initial and continuous teacher education has a responsibility to prepare educators to navigate complexity, emergent issues, and dilemmatic situations – these characterise our current social life.

2. Education during covid-19

In March 2020, the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 as a global pandemic (World Health Organisation, 2020). The Global Education Coalition (UNESCO 2021, 7) estimates that ‘over 1.5 billion learners – representing 91% of the world’s school population – were affected at the peak of the crisis’. This included education at all levels with schools, colleges and universities having to stop ‘residential learning’ (White 2022), and many institutions adopting distance and online learning as a way to minimise the disruption caused by this. It is perhaps important to acknowledge that these ‘remote and remedial’ (The World Bank 2020) responses are not the same as carefully structured e-learning programmes (Andrews 2011). Nonetheless, the pandemic introduced us to remote teaching and online learning (Dhawan 2020). Despite the challenges, there were also some positive developments, such as staff productivity (Ghurbhurun 2020a), safer practice, and new ways to interact and communicate with learners. I argue that teacher education could integrate some of the learnings from this experience to inform the theory and practice of initial and continuing teacher education; for example, that ‘distance is a positive principle, not a deficit’ (Bayne et al. 2020, 5). In this way, this research invites educators to critically engage with their values, beliefs, and identity around their pedagogical practice. As Stommel (2014 para. 18) reminds us that ‘when we’re looking for solutions, what we most need to change is our thinking and not our tools’.

Part of my research and practice as a teacher educator has been dedicated to understanding the uses of technology in education and over the years a salient theme has been the importance of context, which is normally ignored in educational technology research (Rosenberg & Koehler 2018). Any claim of ‘good practice’ of using technology perhaps takes for granted homogenous student populations with equal access to resources, competent digital skills, and levels of motivation to engage with synchronous and/or asynchronous learning. In addition to this, the competence of educators is crucial, and the pandemic brought into light the need to upskill teachers’ digital capabilities, and access to devices and training, to effectively use digital tools (Breslin 2021, Ghurbhurun 2020b, König, Jager-Biela, and Glutsch 2020). Aspects not only of ‘access’ but also ‘awareness’ of how to use technologies have been widely discussed by Beetham and Sharpe (2010; 2020, in Jisc 2014). However, even having those basic conditions to engage with digital technologies are not enough. I echo White’s (2020) assertion that ‘we confuse ownership with capability’, and widespread assumptions that there are correlations between age and digital capabilities are unhelpful and misinformed. For example, König, Jager-Biela, and Glutsch (2020, 609) argue their research participants – early career teachers in Germany – ‘belong to the “digital native” generation [Prensky 2001]’, therefore expected that ‘this target group should be able to quickly adapt to the online teaching challenges posed by the current situation’. Bayne et al. (2020), Helsper and Eynon (2010) and White and Le Cornu (2011) have challenged the hasty, imprecise, and unsupported claims of such thing as ‘digital natives and digital immigrants’ (Prensky 2001). White and LeCornu propose instead the metaphor of ‘place’ to offer a typology of ‘visitors and residents’ regarding needs and motivations to engage with the digital. The pandemic made many of us ‘forced’ residents.

There is an emerging body of work related to education during the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the main aim of this paper is not to appraise available literature but to reflect on the learning from recent experience, the list below offers a starting point to paint a picture of some of the challenges experienced by practitioners and their responses and approaches to these:

• international perspectives of issues and challenges faced by education (Ammigan, Chan, and Bista 2022)

• reflections around teacher vulnerabilities in teacher identity during COVID-19 (Bacova and Turner 2023)

• edited collections of lessons from lockdown (Breslin 2021)

• global responses to teaching (Cooker, Cotton & Toft 2022)

• the need to prioritise wellbeing and resilience (White & McCallum 2021)

• the issues, implications, and best practice of remote learning (Daniela & Visvizi 2022)

• a call for higher education to draw a long-term plan for virtual learning (DeVaney et al. 2020)

• analyses of education as a service, rethinking higher education post-Covid 19 (Ewing 2021)

• predictions around the impact of shifting to virtual learning for higher education (Govindarajan & Srivastava 2020)

• a call to shape the digital future of FE and skills (Ghurbhurun 2020a)

• summary lessons from remote learning (Hasan et al. 2021)

• gender inequalities experienced during lockdowns where work, life and study happened in the same space (Johnston et al. 2023)

• research on the effects of Covid on teacher education in England (Kidd & Murray 2020)

• research on teacher education and early career teachers in Germany (König, Jager-Biela, and Glutsch 2020)

• plans to review blended learning in the UK (Office for Students 2022)

• a literature review of the impact of Covid on teaching and learning (Pokhrel & Chhetri 2021)

• a critique of educational technologies’ failure during the pandemic (Reich 2021)

• lessons learned from the lived experiences of teaching during the pandemic (Reich et al. 2020)

• a collection on critical digital pedagogy (Stommel, Friend, and Morris 2020)

• and expert reflections on the post-pandemic university (White 2022).

From the above, Reich et al.’s (2020) research into lessons learnt from the lived experiences of teachers during lockdown was significant for this study. I build on their findings and themes identified, with the second being central to my research interests:

• Student Motivation: Teachers struggled to motivate their students through two layers of computer screens;

• Professional Loss and Burnout: As they lost familiar means of teaching, teachers also lost a fundamental sense of their own efficacy and professional identity;

• Exacerbated Inequities: This sense of loss grew deeper as teachers witnessed the dramatic intensification of the societal inequities that had always shaped their students’ lives.

This will be further explored in the discussion section. The below explains the research approach.

3. Research design

As previously outlined, this small-scale research project aims to explore the relationship between identity and pedagogy, which I argue is an under-researched area from the current available literature around lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic. The research question that started guiding this process was: What strategies and responses informed HE teachers’ pedagogical approaches to teach online during the COVID-19 pandemic? According to Denzin and Lincoln (2018, 553) my sampling strategy could be described as purposive rather than random, as I required a small sample of participants with experience in teaching college higher education, who experienced the move to online and distance education during the pandemic and were willing to share some of their views and experiences as part of my research. I shared the project outline, including the participant information sheet and indicative themes and questions via Microsoft Teams (see Appendix A) to a group of HE educators interested in research and scholarly activity at my organisation. The expressions of interest came from three members of the teacher education team, who are known to me in a professional capacity. Although this could raise potential conflicts of interest as I would be interviewing participants I know and work with (McConnell-Henry et al. 2010), I had no reason to deny them the opportunity to share their experiences with me once they expressed an interest in being interviewed. I did not feel that they either ‘needed’ to be interviewed or that they felt ‘coerced’ to take part in the research, a concern raised by Johnson and Clarke (2003, 429–430).

My positionality as a teacher educator and researcher, and that of my participants as colleagues and research participants is crucial for the account presented in this research. From the outset I did not envision an unbiased and value-neutral process. A ‘self-awareness’ of my values and assumptions (Ogden 2008, 61) has been part of the methodological decisions and aspects of reflexivity shaping every step of this research project. As Braun and Clarke (2013) remind us, research is a subjective process, and reflexivity in a qualitative inquiry is extremely important to critically reflect on the knowledge we produce as researchers and our role in producing it, thus making the researcher visible throughout. I discuss below Wilkinson’s (1988) distinction of two types of reflexivity: functional and personal, to illustrate how the instruments of data collection and data analysis, as well as themes ‘advanced’ by me and the meaning ascribed to the data (Creswell, 2014, 235) have been shaped by my values, assumptions, and professional interests.

Regarding Wilkinson’s (1988) functional reflexivity, I have paid close attention to every aspect of the research project, aiming to achieve coherence. For example, as I am interested in learning from experience, I chose semi-structured interviews as the tool for data collection based not only on qualitative research literature (for example, Denzin and Lincoln 2018, Guba and Lincoln 1994, 2005) but also on a professional and academic interest of critical reflection as a tool to make sense of experience, learn from it, and inform our future practice (Morantes-Africano 2022). The process was more dialogic than scripted, and subjectivities related to our backgrounds, relationships, and professional interests (Roulston 2008, 2010) were embraced. Prior to the interviews, I shared with the participants the indicative content for the interview but gave them options to choose what to talk about first: challenges or positive experiences of teaching online. This allowed participants to give priority to whatever they decided was more important to them, enabling a conversational approach to the interview process.

In addition to critical reflection, in my professional role as teacher educator I regularly use ‘dialogic feedback’ (Carless et al. 2010), which allows me and my students to make sense of educational theory and practice. Therefore, I brought to the interviews aspects of my professional identity where listening, analysing, evaluating, and interpreting information through interaction with others is part of what I do as teacher educator. I consider this personal reflexivity and professional experience significant to position me as a response-able qualitative researcher. Upon reviewing the ethical risks guidance (University of Glasgow 2022) and the code of good practice in research (University of Glasgow 2018), this research could be considered to have low ethical risks. However, I was mindful that the conversational approach to the interviews (Roulston 2010) engaged participants in reflection around their practice during the time of uncertainty, and for many, anxiety, difficulty or even loss. I strived to guide them to articulate not only the challenges faced but their pedagogical decisions, thus ‘helping them to draw links between their own moral purpose and their professional practice’ (Mockler 2011, 524). I also deliberately prompted them to reflect on positive aspects of the experience to bring some balance to the issues discussed.

I align my work to Inayatullah’s (2020, in Speculative Edu 2020) vision of the future as a learning journey, not a site of prediction. This justifies my decision to share with my participants some insights from my own professional experience as a teacher educator during the time of the pandemic, as I am interested in learning from mine and others’ experiences to inform our future practice. This allowed an active co-construction of meaning from our experience. Importantly, in a constructionist conception of data collection and data analysis, all co-constructed data, including any interviewer’s contributions ‘are subject to the same kind of analytic focus as that of the interviewee’ (Roulston 2010, 60). Examples of this are given below in the findings and discussion sections.

The interviews took between 30 and 40 minutes, two were conducted face-to-face in a private space in the library of my organisation, and one interview was conducted via Zoom – both approaches had the safety of the participants and mine as priorities. All personal data was de-identified and pseudonyms were used instead [Florence, Laura and Graham]. I recorded the live interviews using my password-protected phone and used the approved University of Glasgow Zoom account for the online interview, setup to save the recording in the Cloud and not my laptop. All recordings and transcripts were safely stored and encrypted (Microsoft 2022) in the University of Glasgow OneDrive server via my student account. Due to time constraints, I used Happy Scribe (2022), an online service for the transcription of the audio files from the live interviews, which offered an accurate script that needed very little correction afterwards. The Zoom transcript was less accurate, something that I would advise other qualitative researchers to consider when planning their methods and ways to engage their participants.

Regarding the method of data analysis, I used Braun and Clarke’s approach to reflexive thematic analysis [RTA] (2019; 2021). A summary of the six phases is outlined below, and the reader can find an additional example in Appendix A illustrating the coding and theme generation process.

3.1. Data familiarisation

After the initial transcription was done, I listened to the audio files and corrected the text. I did this shortly after each of the interviews, which offered a second level of familiarisation, with the interviewing being the first. I listened to the audio files at least twice and read the transcripts at least three times each, adding comments to the documents and highlighting key text that I found interesting or aligned to the research intentions, focusing on data where the articulation of experience also offered strategies employed to deal with the newness of the situation.

3.2. Coding

Coding is a process of interpretation (emphasis in original), beyond simple identification (Braun and Clarke 2022, 9). The processes of familiarisation and coding were iterative, allowing me to engage with the data from deductive and inductive perspectives. Coding allowed me to identify both manifest (semantic or descriptive) and latent (implicit or conceptual) meanings (Braun and Clarke 2022, 5) from the data. I found the latter particularly useful, as it allows me as a researcher to act as a critical social commentator, contextualising the meaning of the data within a particular social space. In this case the significance of identity as a latent theme that my participants shared as a key feature to deal with challenging situations.

3.3. Generating themes

Coding helped me to generate the themes. For example, regarding challenges I identified some manifest codes: uncertainty; maintaining relationships; concerns; achievement of trainee teachers/practicum; engagement/motivation; boundaries; and using new systems. Some positive aspects were also identified: new ways for relationship building; development of digital skills; positive behaviour; and viability to continue learning remotely. The salient categories were challenges and opportunities. These did not naturally appear as theme development involved an active, in-depth, and iterative process. I acknowledge that these themes were filtered by my assumptions and research intentions, that is, I looked for data aligned to decisions, strategies, responses, and lessons learnt.

3.4. Reviewing potential themes

This was part of the many readings and in-depth engagement with the transcripts, whilst reading research reports of similar studies (e.g. Reich et al.’s 2020 research of teachers’ lived experiences of lockdown; and Kessler 2021 and Mockler’s 2011 work on teacher identity). As themes are individual but part of the whole dataset, it is important to tell a story that remains close to the research question. I checked that the themes were central organising concepts and avoided having too many themes, as this could mean fragmentation or poor interpretation of the data (Braun and Clarke 2019). At this stage it was important to analyse the ‘quality’ of the theme. Braun and Clarke (2019) also advise new researchers to be prepared to ‘let things go’, not to get overly attached to the themes generated but to ask if these work within the entire dataset. This is particularly relevant when dealing with a large dataset.

3.5. Defining and naming themes

Here, I decided to group the themes into two categories: challenges and opportunities. The first section named ‘losses and compromises’ tells a story of newness, challenges to educators’ traditional ways to do education and also some of the challenges to motivate and engage students, including examples of their strategies and responses to these issues. As the interviews also explored positive aspects, there were two salient themes: 1) digital skills development, which applies to both teacher educators and their trainees, and 2) relationship building, in which redressing hierarchies and getting to know aspects of the private lives and spaces of the trainees were highlighted. I then selected extracts to provide a ‘vivid and compelling account of the arguments’ (Byrne 2022, 1407) made for each theme.

3.6. Producing the report

The next section presents a summary of the findings, categorised as outlined above. The first part contains mostly the ‘manifest’ aspects of the data and is rather descriptive. However, I also engaged with the data in an inductive way and the subsequent discussion section presents an example of a ‘latent’ theme: the significance of teacher identity to inform pedagogy in a time of uncertainty. This closely relates to the research question, that is, strategies and responses. Thus, the title of the report makes identity a central organising theme. It also gives an example of my reflexive approach to the data collected. I chose to highlight the ability of these educators to turn challenges into learning opportunities, informed by their pedagogical values and beliefs.

4. Findings

4.1. Challenges: losses and compromises

The three participants articulated a journey where the announcement of the first lockdown brought unparalleled levels of uncertainty. As initial teacher education combines theory and practice, trainee teachers required an engagement with their PGCE lessons as well as the practicum. Their strategies and responses clearly align to this as a major concern. As Florence articulates, pre-lockdown, her strategy to prepare for these two aspects was: ‘my first priority was making assessments achievable [by] rewriting module guides and tasks guidance’. Also,

I spent a lot of time in the first few weeks kind of looking at what would be realistic in terms of teaching practice, how we could get teaching practice requirements changed so that students could achieve.

This concern for student achievement was shared by Laura, whose strategy to support trainees’ learning was to try out a new way to convey information when in-person teaching was no longer possible:

I clearly remember spending a lot of time creating like recorded PowerPoints, you know, with kind of voiceover, stuff like that, and essentially kind of following the same kind of structure, the same kind of tasks that I would normally have but just recording it and also putting tasks on Moodle for them.

Graham asserts that one of his core beliefs about teacher education is that ‘what we do in input sessions is what we want people to do in theirs. So, loop input, experiential learning, that is my guiding principle, I suppose’. This was challenging when teaching online, as language learning requires particular conditions:

I think the interactive element is particularly important in a language teaching context where students are developing their language skills through interaction. So probably the main challenge of teaching online was replicating that in an online context, … and I don’t think I managed it.

As posited by Reich et al. (2020, 3), Graham experienced a ‘professional and identity loss’, as his strong belief in ‘student-centred, interactive and collaborative learning’ was limited by the conditions of online systems. As Graham observes: ‘at least at the start of my lockdown teaching experience, things were more teacher centred than I wanted them to be’. This also included the challenge of monitoring learners during lessons:

If I think about how I would monitor in the classroom, just getting out and around and listening to conversations going on and looking what students are noting down and that was really, really difficult.

Laura experienced a similar challenge regarding monitoring, and her response was to use the breakout rooms function on Zoom, however:

I did some eavesdropping actually, at first I jumped into [the breakout room], but they didn’t have any warning and suddenly they realised I was there and they stopped talking, so I did less and less of that.

For Laura, Graham and Florence, student interaction was a main concern. After Florence talked to her students about their initial experience of remote learning, ‘pretty quickly, it was really, really clear that what they wanted was to see each other’. For Florence’s trainee teachers this need stemmed from wanting ‘to see each other, … to talk to each other and feel like normality’. Graham concurs:

people on the PGCE referred explicitly to missing the interactions they had in breaks and coffees, going to get coffee from the machine, the kind of informal chats that would happen there. And there was, at least initially, none of that.

These three teacher educators tried various systems to facilitate student interaction, including online forums. However, Florence reports a struggle to get students to contribute and suggests that they were more motivated when interacting in-person ‘because if they’re in a classroom with the people really, that’s their motivation to do that’. Laura experienced something similar:

I was putting like questions and things on the group, trying to get them to interact, but they didn’t. Only one person was putting stuff up. So, it became an interaction between me and the student and not the whole group, which I didn’t like.

Florence also shared how the ‘management of multiple systems and resource organisation’, ‘working long hours’ and the stress generated by her organisational policy of extending students’ hand-in dates meant ‘basically almost working towards individualised dates’. In order to manage student support with academic and practical work, the use of tutorials seems to have been a key strategy. However, Florence acknowledges that ‘tutorial support was necessary and good, but very time consuming’; also, how that level of ‘flexibility and responsiveness … . made delivery harder’. Laura also reflects that:

I set their expectations that they could do that during this year and they expect to have tutorials with me anytime on any evening. And I have ended up working every evening and that’s not good for me. So, I need to set new expectations for this year.

5. Opportunities

5.1. Digital skills development

The three participants of this research contrasted the initial experience of online teaching with a newly developed confidence by learning from the experience and involving trainee teachers in the process. For example, Florence acknowledges that:

when we went into the next academic year the sort of 2021 academic delivery was planned to be 50% online so that was really good. It was a really good opportunity to kind of capitalise on what we’d already developed, so I actually felt like pretty confident, by then, because I’d delivered a lot of lessons online.

During the interview with Graham when he articulated that one of his core beliefs was the use of the ‘loop input’, I offered an example of how I used this approach as a key strategy to develop my trainee teachers’ digital skills too. I am familiar with the theory and practice of the ‘loop input’ (Woodward 2003), and it is also one of my core pedagogical strategies for teacher education. As a form of experiential learning that metacognitively involves participants through the contents and processes of learning (Morantes-Africano 2022). I offered that:

as all of us were new to it, my strategy to cope with the move to online learning was to talk to my trainees, put my hands up and say: I’m new to this, you may be new to this too, so we will be learning together. By involving them, and basically becoming an equal, I invited them to figure this out together.

To this, Graham responded:

Yes, you’re absolutely right. And I found the same thing. And in conversations with colleagues in the department, I think that’s been a thread, hasn’t it? And that was one of the positive things, actually, that sort of redressed the balance of power slightly and the expertise that we need: I was so obviously not the expert anymore in that field.

Laura also offered a similar view here:

in the classroom you’re set up as the separate person and everybody else is on the table because you’re the one at the front, whereas on the TV or the laptop screen you’re all equal and you all jump around the screen and you’re all next to each other at different points. I do think it makes a real difference in terms of distance and hierarchy.

One of the examples that Graham gave about involving his students in the loop input approach was through critical reflections and evaluations of the process, which for him meant overtly asking

How’s this working for you? What do you think of this? Not in a raising awareness way, but actually, no, please give me some feedback. Can we work this out together? Is there anything you can do to improve what we’ve just done?

Laura also felt that learning with her students helped her:

The second time we went into lockdown and we used Teams and Zoom, although we hadn’t had that much experience with it, I felt a bit more confident with it because we’ve tried things out with each other.

5.2. Relationship building

An interesting aspect of the ways these educators embraced digital means to develop peer-to-peer and tutor-trainee relationships included the use of the breakout rooms. Sometimes ‘without me so that they could just have a moan or sharing things that they didn’t want to share with me’ [Laura]. Or using the cameras to start the lesson

with something like looking at people’s pets, actually, because you were inside people’s houses and they were inside yours. Essentially the relationships I think were a lot stronger, because you spent a lot more time with the students.

Graham also suggests that learning from home had advantages. For example,

If you’re trying to lower anxiety in a classroom, then if you’ve got your dog next to you, that’s a nice thing. I suppose those basic needs of comfort food, drink, the company of a dog were met by online teaching.

However, post-lockdown, Laura found a contradiction between trainees wanting to return to in-person learning versus their attendance to college:

I know a lot of the students, especially in the second year, said they didn’t like learning from home. They didn’t enjoy that. They wanted to be in the classroom. But then when we started gradually coming back where we were doing 50% online, 50% remote, they weren’t turning up to the sessions. That’s amazing. I don’t really understand what’s happening here.

Graham concurs:

Well, is it wrong of me to say that some of them just like being at home? It’s a part-time course. They were working, most of them, online themselves during the day. When we came to offer the possibility of continuing remote sessions, some had a clear preference for being at home, and I totally understand that, but that was less during lockdown, more after they returned to work, and they’ve been at work all day.

5.2.1. Lessons learnt for future practice

The key messages that my research participants wanted to share regarding their learning from the experience so far are:

• I think it’s cheesy but try and replicate [your pedagogy] if you’re teaching in another context. Don’t lose sight of the things that you believe about teaching. And if you believe that teaching should be a student centred, interactive, collaborative process of guided discovery, then that needs to happen. [Graham].

• The move to online delivery was stressful but doable. I think actually what was hard was going back to the face to face in classrooms that look like exams, where it was difficult to bring about collaborative learning, it was actually much easier to get people to work together and talk together online. [Florence].

• Definitely continue teaching some of the modules online because I think it was really beneficial. I saw some amazing stuff with the students who worked with their learners who have quite complex needs, but they really set things up online very well and they did such a good job. And I think it’s a really good skill, and I think we should just keep going with it. My own confidence, if I don’t keep up these skills, I’m going to lose them again. So, I do think we need to continue doing that. [Laura].

6. Discussion: the significance of teacher identity to inform pedagogy in a time of uncertainty

Here, I put forward identity as the central organising theme of the dataset. It followed an inductive analysis in which values and beliefs appear to be structurally significant for pedagogical decision making. Kessler (2021) and Mockler (2011) have already explored the relationship between teacher identity and pedagogy. However, their work is not conceptualised around ‘emergency’ decision-making, which was a feature of teaching online, especially at the beginning of the pandemic. For Norton (2013, 45), identity refers to ‘how a person understands his or her relationship to the world, how that relationship is constructed across time and space’. Mockler (2011, 517) also proposes that teachers’ decision-making is framed by ‘their understanding and positioning of themselves as a product of their professional identity’. Similarly, Kessler’s (2021, 2) research identified that ‘teachers drew upon their own personal experiences for pedagogical reasons’, which relates to how different teachers’ personalities, experiences, and material circumstances are important to respond to student needs (Stommel, Friend and Morris 2020). Aspects of personal and professional identity seem to be significant for decision-making; however, Mockler (2011, 520) offers the ‘external political environment’ as a third domain. These are briefly discussed below.

Regarding the personal domain, teachers’ aspects of their personal lives – such as class, race or gender – outside of their professional role, influence their professional practice. Crucially, ‘teachers’ own experience of school (as students themselves) is a particularly salient factor of this domain’ (Mockler 2011, 520). When considering a teacher as a lifelong learner, ‘schooling’ happens every day through our reflective practice. As outlined in the findings, during the pandemic we moved from being the expert and confident educators to being novices when it came to digital technologies.

As a reflexive researcher, I noticed how the interview process helped me realise how my own identity informed my pedagogical responses to the challenges of the pandemic: I believed in my problem-solving skills and my ability as a learner; my identity and personal history were key pedagogical tools when responding to the pandemic. I would argue that for educators, the who I am, what I do, and why I do it, are inextricably linked. For example, I believe in trust, kindness, and compassion as strategies to empower people. This means honesty, hard truths, spelling out issues to make sense of them and try to find strategies to address them as a collaborative process. I invited my students to use what was happening as a learning opportunity, and how that learning would help them in future practice – not an easy task, as most of us were unprepared and uncertain about the events evolving before us, but we needed to learn to navigate them. This ‘believing people and believing in people’ (Denial 2019, para. 8) made kindness as pedagogy salient in these challenging times, which as Denial asserts, ‘the kindness offered by honesty challenges both myself and my students to grow’ (para. 7). Despite the challenges, I witnessed the personal and professional development of my students, and as observed Crooks (in Breslin 2021, 125) we must recognise their expertise as they belong to a unique cohort of trainee teachers who have been online learners themselves.

The above also illustrates how personal and professional development could develop in tandem. Our professional domain is influenced by our education and training, including initial and continuing teacher education, as well as our practical experience. Our ‘career histories, professional learning and development experience … shape our “professional selves”’ (Mockler 2011, 521). This resonates with König, Jager-Biela, and Glutsch’s (2020, 609) observation that ‘teachers’ competence and teacher education opportunities to learn digital competence contribute to teachers’ mastery of the challenges of the specific situation’. If educators have little training and support to develop digital skills, we are ultimately robbing them from learning opportunities and by proxy, disadvantaging students. The third ‘external political environment’ (Mockler 2011, 521) pertains to policy, organisational ethos, and professional standards, which during the time of pandemic added extra pressure for teachers, especially around whether students would engage, learn, and develop remotely.

At the intersection of these three we see how the identity of my participants and mine as a practitioner too, came to the fore when articulating our online teaching experience over the last two years. There were losses, not only of space and physical contact but of our personal and unique ways to do education. This loss, however, could not be grieved as we had students to support. We did not only respond as professionals but also as humans, our personal and professional values guided our decision-making processes around teaching and learning, supporting the welfare of our students, meeting stakeholders’ expectations while looking after our own personal lives. ‘What I do’ and ‘why I am here’ (Mockler 2011) became ever so important in times of uncertainty. I have extended this by adding the ‘who I am’, as our personal identity is inextricably linked to our professional selves. As highlighted by Breslin (2021) the decision-making for a lot of educators became a matter of prioritising what they believed was most important. My invitation with these reflections around identity is to embrace our uniqueness as individuals, to critically check our values and beliefs, which inevitably informs our professional identities, approaches, and responses to challenges.

7. Conclusion

By reflecting on how teacher identity became paramount to make decisions during a time of crisis, I invite educators, policymakers, and the wider education sector to reflect on the relationship between identity and pedagogy. Articulating who we are, what we do and why we do it is a complex task. However, I would echo Breslin’s (2021, 153) view that the pandemic helped to ‘raise a positive profile of the teaching profession’ and agree with his recommendation that initial and continuing teacher education need to capture lessons learnt from this experience and use such learning for future initial training and professional development. Although the process has been undeniable difficult and challenging, we need to carry forward lessons learnt rather than trying to go back to replicate fixed ways of doing education (Breslin 2008). The process may be long and arduous, but we have already started a process of ‘tinkering’ (Ames 2019) our practice through small steps, such as hybrid approaches, use of online systems to access and engage with learning materials, and new ways to teach and assess students. Our lived experience of the advantages and limitations of online and distance education can help us take stock of what we do and why we do it, to perhaps articulate it to who we are as individuals too. As bell hooks (1994, 43) reminds us ‘there can be, and usually is, some degree of pain involved in giving up old ways of thinking and knowing and learning new approaches’. We as a collective have shown resilience and creative ways to deal with challenges, thus adding new layers of who we are – this can be pedagogically powerful.

Disclosure statement

I confirm that I am the sole author of this paper. All sourced material has been referenced. The project was ethically approved by the University of Glasgow, and there was no funding attached to this project that could influence its proceedings.

Appendix A

– illustration of the process of data analysis using Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA)

Below is an example of how interview transcripts were analysed to generate themes using RTA. The research question was: What strategies and responses informed HE teachers’ pedagogical approaches to teach online during the COVID-19 pandemic? These indicative themes and questions guided the semi-structured interviews:

1. Contextual information: what do you teach and how long have you been teaching in HE at a college.

2. Recalling the move to online education during lockdowns, what would you say were the main challenges and how did you overcome/address them?

3. Also, were there any positive aspects of teaching online? Can you highlight them?

4. Overall, what would you say you have learnt from this experience?

5. What would you recommend future educators to do or to avoid doing when teaching online?

The diagram below uses Braun and Clarke’s (2019, 2021) six phases of RTA to illustrate the process of theme generation. Overall, the data analysis using transcripts from the semi-structured interviews was focused on identifying instances where the articulation of experience also offered examples of how challenges were dealt with, or positive accounts where there was clear learning or realisations from the experience. The below illustrates some of the answers to question 2: what were main challenges and how did you overcome/address them? Each example illustrates the process of coding, theme generation, refinement, and the decision to present mostly manifest themes (semantic responses to the questions asked) as the key findings. However, as RTA is a process of theme generation rather than discovery, the main latent theme of teacher identity was chosen as the centrally organising concept that underpins all participant’s pedagogical strategies used during COVID-19 lockdowns and forms the main discussion section of the paper.

Table

1. Familiarisation with interview data	2. Examples of coding and my reflections	3 and 4. Generating and refining themes	5. Naming themes	6. Report
Florence: …we were going into the unknown and just had no idea what this would be like, how long it would go on for, how we would keep in touch with people, if we had the IT capacity, or how we would be affected by the virus … so my first priority was making assessments achievable [by] rewriting module guides and tasks guidance	Uncertainty re the new virus, lockdown and IT [manifest] By making assessments achievable, Florence shows strategic thinking to support student’s achievement [latent code]	In these extracts, participants articulate challenges related to uncertainties and own strategies and responses to these (uncertainty as a manifest theme) However, all used key pedagogical values to respond and had the students’ wellbeing, educational experience, and outcomes as main concerns (latent theme).	The three examples presented here were grouped under ‘challenges: losses and compromises’ after an iterative process between selecting primary data and reading and interpreting literature to make sense of such. These allowed the categorisations of 1) challenges, and 2) opportunities. Under these ‘losses and compromises’ are the umbrella theme for challenges, and digital skills development and relationship building were chosen as the positive aspects experienced by the research participants.	Once themes were named, relevant quotes were moved under each subheading, allowing a narrowing down of the data to be presented while trying to tell a story of the overall dataset. Overall, the manifest themes were presented as findings but the latent theme of ‘teacher identity’ was chosen to guide the analysis and interpretation of the overall dataset.
Laura: I don’t think I knew how to do the live stuff. I didn’t have never used Zoom or anything like that. So, I thought, I know how to use Moodle if I recorded stuff. That’s an easy way of getting it going over to people and then asking them to post responses.	Uncertainty re own digital capability; concern re student engagement [manifest] Laura responded by adopting and adapting previously experienced pedagogical tools to engage students. Her belief in engagement guided this strategy [latent code]
Graham: one of my core beliefs about teacher education is that what we do in input sessions is what we want people to do in theirs… so, student centred, lots of interaction, lots of peer teaching, peer assessment, lots of guided discovery, and those are the things that I believe should be happening in the classroom… I found that the bits of software that I did use and apply to my practice were things that I could seize on and use for a really clear purpose. It wasn’t just for its own sake… it was to help me do what I would do in the classroom. For example, Jamboard, which was like a godsend to me because if I think of the kind of things that I do both with my trainees on the PGCE course that I also want them to do with [their] GCSE [English] or ESOL students is the sort of brainstorming of ideas, [or] sharing of knowledge on a given topic…	Professional values: experiential learning Uncertainty around how to navigate the loss of face-to-face teaching in language education [manifest] Graham responded by using e-tools to replicate some of what he believes is important in language education (Jamboard to encourage student interaction) [latent code]