Search results

Happiness in teaching, termed Eudemonia, comes from a perception of a relationship with students. Such a perception is vital to sustaining teachers in their work in both on- and offline contexts. While the importance of these relationships has been acknowledged, there have not been attempts to account for how teachers pursue relationships and the accompanying sense of happiness. It is in this frame that we discuss findings from a larger study of online teachers working to support students with disabilities in a part-time program at a large virtual school.

The chapter considers expectations for online teachers and sets up a dialogue between same and different as they relate to on- and offline pedagogy. It then asks more questions about these responsibilities in the context of efforts by teachers to feel legitimate in their claims to relationships with students.

Stories that both elicited and threatened Eudemonia are shared and discussed. In particular, the authors learned that online teachers desired relationships with students to such a great extent that they were willing to narrate relationality into most interactions with the students.

These findings suggest the difficult emotional work that online teachers must do in order to consider their work with students as beneficial. More work is needed to think about how relationships between teachers and students online can be leveraged for greater learning and to sustain both teachers and students in their work.

This chapter offers in-depth insight into the teacher work that online learning requires. It also offers a unique theoretical approach in the juxtaposition of stories of relationships with students online and offline.

This chapter attends to the fact that research has revealed much about the importance of parents in this process, especially their increased instructional roles when their children undertake online courses. However, little is known about how online curriculum vendors construct the parents of their potential enrollees in order to make online learning an appealing option.

This research examined what these testimonials revealed about how such companies conceptualize the beliefs parents of potential students. Inductive narrative theme analysis was used to analyze the testimonials.

The findings of this research revealed a characterization of parents as providers of access to online learning, organizers of schedules around online learning, and leveraging time working online as space to nurture and support their children’s academic development. The major plotline of these testimonials is one where parents solve problems for their children, who are not being successful in school, which resolves anxiety about a child’s previous school performance and their future as students. For the parents, the benefit to this enrollment is increased feelings of efficacy.

This research comments on the role of narrative in educational decision-making in general and has additional potential to inform online teacher work with parents.

The value in this chapter lies in the author’s unique approach to inquiry. Very little research on online learning has looked critically at what vendors promise in online learning.

As the novel virus was declared a pandemic, Korean schools quickly transitioned to remote schooling based on its advanced IT system, government-operated digital learning platforms, and an abundance of pre-existing online teaching materials (Byun & Slavin, 2020). Unfortunately, this story of “successful” educational responses to the pandemic was of little relationship to physical education (PE) partly because of the sparsity of supportive resources for online teaching of the hands-on subject area but mainly because of the incompatibility between the nature of the online classroom and the essence of PE (Baek & Yoon, 2020; Oh, 2021). As its name implies, physical education is inseparable from physical movements, bodily dialogue, close physical contact, and active, direct interactions between engaged individuals. Accordingly, PE teachers, dwelling in either online or blended classrooms where bodies are absent, and touch is unthinkable, are experiencing diminished room to implement their pedagogical repertoires and, in turn, affecting their deconstruction and reconstruction of their teacher identities (Kamoga & Varea, 2022). In a nutshell, PE subject matter and PE teachers' identities are being challenged and experiencing unexpected metamorphoses amid this global crisis.

This paper aims to explore the experiences of a high school senior, a doctoral student, a university professor and an online academic coach with a rapid, unplanned shift to online learning in the USA during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand the challenges and distinct skills they identify as essential for success in a 100% virtual learning environment.

Through scholarly personal narratives (SPNs), the researchers shared details and authentic knowledge regarding their experiences and perceptions of successful teaching and learning in a 100% online learning environment.

The main goal was to identify necessary skills for success in a 100% virtual learning environment resulting from an unplanned shift. The findings show a need for learner and teacher self-directedness in developing a variety of nontraditional, critical literacies.

In light of the imposed and unplanned educational shifts in teaching and learning, this study has strong practical implications for human resource development offered through an analysis of multiple perspectives. This research may lead to a better understanding of how, in a period of rapid, unexpected shifts, individuals need to use self-directedness to leverage personal and professional development opportunities to adapt and succeed in the new environment. Additionally, the authors use an innovative critical theoretical framework to outline the skills the participants report as useful for success in an online classroom during a period of rapid, unexpected shifting.

This paper explores breakthroughs or ‘lift‐off’ moments in learning involving several teacher/researchers and their students in China. The data come from teaching and research situations centring on teaching and learning English as a foreign language (EFL). An analysis of the language features of the data and their effects explores learning by tracing movement from initial impasses to breakthrough moments, as participants interact, shift ground and discover new learning. Definition of these lift‐off moments and ways of knowing centres in a sense of discovery that pushes learning forward and simultaneously pulls together life experiences in new directions for specific pedagogical insights, self‐assessment and identity conclusions, and recognition of the power of inquiry. In particular, the paper explores the potential contribution of narrative forms of collaborative inquiry in learning, as evident in two contrasting exemplars, the first coconstructed in face‐to‐face interviews or conversational settings, and the second, thesis supervision by the distance learning one‐to‐one format of emailing. These documented interchanges between two Chinese postgraduate EFL teachers and their research coursework teacher and supervisor come from a wide data bank of exemplars collected over many years, and from linguistically diverse contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the lived experiences from the voice of the authors (a science professor, an instructional designer, a distance learning doctoral intern, and a distance learning director) in the process of transitioning a face-to-face science course to online modality at a large, research university.

The method of this qualitative inquiry involves a personal narrative approach in which the authors reflect on their experiences of this process and analyze it through writing.

The findings examine the challenges of moving a traditional course online and reiterate the value of a team approach to ensure its quality. The narrative offers clarity to the different phases of such a project and can enhance decision making among those involved in course design and delivery, as well as administrators incentivizing the conversion of traditional courses to the online modality.

Online education has emerged as a viable solution. The challenges and rewards of transitioning face-to-face courses to distance learning modalities are well documented, even for a senior science educator.

Universities face several modern day challenges, including reductions in state appropriations, lack of available space for classes, challenges of engaging a technologically savvy generation, and preparing students for a global marketplace.

To support faculty members’ transition to online education, universities offer instructional design support, where ideas are exchanged with faculty members to ensure pedagogically sound and engaging distance learning. The authors conclude with recommendations for both practice and future research in the area of practice and process improvement for diffusion of online courses at traditional universities, one course at a time. This is important to those beginning to transition course offerings online.

Purpose – This chapter investigates if Ronald Aker’s Social Structure Social Learning (SSSL) theory can help explain who is involved with the production of online materials considered hateful or extremist.

Methodology/Approach – After discussing how SSSL can account for becoming exposed to online extremism and then becoming involved in its production, the authors conduct a logistic regression on data from 1,008 American adults that predicts if they produced online hate materials with variables derived from SSSL.

Findings – Results strongly support SSSL. While structural factors such as the respondents’ differential social organization, differential social location, and differential location in the social structure predict production of online hate materials, the effect of these factors is largely mediated once social learning variables are included in the model. Specifically, the respondents’ general definitions related to violence, specific definitions related to hate speech, and differential association accounts for variation in the production of online hate materials.

Originality/Value – This research contributes to the literature in two primary ways: (1) the authors investigate a critical, yet understudied, factor involved in the radicalization process; and (2) the authors demonstrate that a leading criminological theory applies to this form of deviance. This research also suggests key variables for creating strategies for countering violent extremism.

This chapter traces one student teacher's (Joan) experiences of learning to teach English as a second language in a cross-cultural context during a teaching practicum in Hong Kong. The school-based practicum is a core component of many initial teacher education programmes. During this induction period, usually an 8-week block, student teachers are placed in local schools to learn how to integrate theories into practice in real teaching situations. Specifically, I uncover how Joan grappled with the tensions and complexities of teaching young learners from a different cultural and linguistic background, in a small elementary school situated in the borderland between Hong Kong (an autonomous region of China) and Shenzhen (a province of Mainland China).

Critical incidents from Joan's practicum experiences were analysed to uncover how she dealt with the tensions and dilemmas in confronting difference and marginalising practices while learning to teach English as a second language (ESL) in the practicum school. Implications on how to develop initial teacher education programmes so that student teachers learning to teach across cultural contexts can be encouraged to explore, confront and ‘deal with the emotional terrain of understanding difference’ will be discussed (Boler & Zembylas, 2003, p. 123; Zembylas, 2010).

With the ongoing catastrophe of the COVID-19 pandemic, the world seems to have come to a standstill. Daily living routines, work, and schools predominantly launched into a state of confusion, and people across the globe excessively find ways to cope with their experiences of this traumatic disaster. Concerning schools, the pandemic has dramatically challenged the education system with teaching and learning processes managed remotely, utilising online platforms. This paper explores university students’ perception of online learning, specifically during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, to uncover how they respond to this ‘new normal’ digital mode of teaching and learning and how they seek to regain control over the sudden shift in their lives. Through interviews with students from Universiti Darussalam (UBD) and Universiti Islam Sultan Sharif Ali UNISSA, this original article reveals students’ transformative behaviours during online learning, and institutional supports that contribute to the shaping of students' online learning experiences in Brunei.

In this paper, the authors review the extant literature on e-learning effectiveness in higher education (HE) to investigate how teachers are affected by the actions that the management of higher education institutions (HEIs) need to take to address the success factors that are critical for e-learning effectiveness. E-learning, in the context of this study, encompasses the delivery of and access to a coordinated collection of learning materials and instructions over an electronic medium using a web server to provide the materials and a web browser to access them.

To address the study's aims the authors employ a narrative literature review methodology. Since the area under review is comprehensive and it entails the examination of several topics, the authors have selected this methodology to ensure thorough coverage, and a narrative literature review approach can provide the required degree of thoroughness as it covers a wide range of topics within the thematic area under review. The authors focus on contemporary scientific studies published between January 2017 and May 2022 on how teachers involved in e-learning are affected by management actions taken to achieve success factors for e-learning effectiveness within the HE sector, after identifying and grouping the success factors identified in prior literature into dimensions that reinforce effectiveness.

The authors of the present study have identified and outlined the most prevalent success factor dimensions by performing a narrative review of the extant literature on the topics of e-learning effectiveness and success factors, and by grouping the various success factors identified into the overarching dimensions presented. These dimensions must also be examined in terms of their relevant importance to the most significant e-learning stakeholder groups. Prior studies have made attempts to obtain relevant stakeholder views on success factors for e-learning, with the student perspective naturally being the most widely covered point of view in terms of e-learning success factors prioritization. More studies are needed that tackle the teachers' perspective as well, since this would enable researchers to determine how teachers view e-learning effectiveness success factors.

The authors also discover that the main success factors in literature are not discussed nearly enough from teachers' perspectives. The authors, therefore, highlight the importance of addressing teachers' perspectives, mainly because this will reinforce teacher acceptance of the e-learning system adopted by an HEI, and the authors also outline future research avenues through which the perception of teachers could be obtained. The authors have identified the technique of knowledge management as a potential method to involve teachers in the decision-making process concerning the management of e-learning more, by taking their views into account and documenting them. The authors have discerned that teachers' acceptance of e-learning would be reinforced by supportive management actions since as a result, teachers see improvements in their technological literacy and pedagogical skills, and this would bring about increased motivation, satisfaction and acceptance of e-learning systems.