As university-based educational researchers interested in school-based pedagogies around technology enhanced learning (TEL), we worked with various stakeholders during Covid-19 lockdowns, with many commenting how ‘uplifting’ they found contact during these difficult times. Despite the backdrop of global risks, this became a ‘special time’, recognising that participation during Covid-19 required exceptional emotional resources of schoolteachers. Now three years after the ‘lockdowns’, school closures and rapid online teaching associated with Covid-19 globally, how do we check-in with colleagues after these extraordinary events?
In this blog post we reflect upon our comparative research adopting Brookfield’s (1995) ‘critical lenses’. Our aim is to explore the post-Covid-19 legacy for TEL in schools, thinking about how teachers make ‘design choices’ through their engagement with technology. We have designed an approach, outlined in stages below, that helps us to use the previous samples of our Covid-19 research now as ‘critical friends’ in new forthcoming research, connecting them to new teachers in new national samples from both Greece and England.
Previously, Kidd has explored the Covid-19 experience of teachers, teacher educators and school communities (Kidd & Murray, 2022) with early data disseminated through the BERA Blog (see The rise of the flexible and remote teacher and Agility, return and recovery). Misirli and Komis have explored Covid-19 TEL through pupils, teachers, parents and leaders’ voices, creating pen portraits of exemplarity practice under challenging circumstances. What has united our work is an interest in the ‘pedagogic agility’ (Kidd & Murray, 2022) displayed by teachers in our respective nations. Our current project is comparative, drawing and uniting samples from both England and Greece, adopting what we call here our ‘Close Approximation Model’ (CAM).
