"I Think It Made Me More Brave”: Uncertainty and Change During the COVID Pandemic

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Teachers as Education Change Makers: What Empowers and/or Enervates Them (Table 8)

Abstract

This study explores changes that teachers made to their curriculum or instruction in response to the COVID pandemic and have continued into the 2022-23 year. Using interviews with teachers in Maine about the impact and persistence of their changes, I argue that many can be understood as efforts to either leverage or mitigate the novel and heightened levels of environmental and technical uncertainty created by the pandemic: e.g., trying to provide more consistency and predictability for their students or embracing more flexibility in their teaching; feeling their beliefs and practices have been tested and proven through the trial of the pandemic or feeling unable to see or measure whether their efforts are effective in such unusual conditions.

Author

• Lauren Yoshizawa, Colby College