Pandemic designs for the future: perspectives of technology education teachers during COVID-19
Information and Learning Sciences
ISSN: 2398-5348
Article publication date: 7 July 2020
Issue publication date: 27 July 2020
Abstract
Purpose
The disruption caused by the pandemic declaration and subsequent public health measures put in place have had a substantial effect on teachers’ abilities to support student engagement in technology education (TE). The purpose of this paper is to explore the following research question: How do TE teachers see emergency remote teaching (ERT) transitions to blended learning into the next academic year affecting their profession?
Design/methodology/approach
A snowball and convenience sampling design was used to recruit specialist teachers in TE through their professional organization and were asked to respond to the question: What are your concerns about the future of teaching TE remotely? The qualitative data collected from the participants (N = 42) was analyzed thematically (Braun and Clarke, 2006).
Findings
The analysis revealed that the switch to ERT impacted the teachers’ ability to support hands-on competency development owing to inequitable student access to tools, materials and resources, all of which affected student motivation and engagement. As a result, teachers raised questions about the overall effectiveness of online learning approaches and TE’s future and sustainability if offered completely online.
Originality/value
This research is the first of its kind exploring the experiences of TE teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. In answer to the challenges identified by teachers, the authors offer a blended learning design framework informed by pandemic transformed pedagogy that can serve as a model for educators to use when designing blended instruction.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the British Columbia Technology Education Association and the technology education teachers for participating in this research. We would also like to acknowledge the UBC Technology Education teacher candidate class of 2020 and Dr Samson Nashon and Kerry Renwick for their insightful feedback on drafts of this manuscript.
This article is part of the special issue, “A Response to Emergency Transitions to Remote Online Education in K-12 and Higher Education” which contains shorter, rapid-turnaround invited works, not subject to double blind peer review. The issue was called, managed and produced on short timeline in Summer 2020 towards pragmatic instructional application in the Fall 2020 semester.
Funding: Jillianne Code is supported in part by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (430–2016-00480).
Citation
Code, J., Ralph, R. and Forde, K. (2020), "Pandemic designs for the future: perspectives of technology education teachers during COVID-19", Information and Learning Sciences, Vol. 121 No. 5/6, pp. 419-431. https://doi.org/10.1108/ILS-04-2020-0112
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited