Individualized Digital Remote Teaching in Norway During the Pandemic: Challenges and Possibilities Regarding Equity

• In Event: Educational Impact of COVID-19: A Comparative Perspective Examining Finland, Mexico, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, and South Africa

Abstract

During the periods in 2020 with closed schools due to the Covid 19 outbreak, teachers in Norway had to rely on digital technology to communicate with their students. Despite the high digital infrastructure, previous research has shown that teachers’ actual uptake of technology has varied greatly. The main objective of this paper is to investigate how educators in Norway responded to the Pandemic and what characterized the teaching practices during the period with closed schools and remote teaching.

Making the home of each student the place where all schooling happens over long stretches of time, greatly challenges the ideals associated inclusive education regardless of for example academic achievement and socioeconomic background. We draw on theories and previous research on equity to discuss to what degree and how key ideals of equity for all students were challenged during the period of remote teaching in the spring 2020 in Norway.

The research data we draw on consists of a national survey with both closed and open-ended questions we developed to map typical teaching. 4642 parents from different regions in Norway, who have children in primary education (grades 1-10) who were taught remotely during the period of closed schools, responded. The closed questions were analyzed with traditional descriptive statistics exploring possible relationships for example between how parents perceived the digital teaching situation, the hours they spent on a typical day supporting their child with school assignments and the parents’ educational background. The open-ended questions were analyzed qualitatively with traditional content analyses, to identify trends in parents’ responses.

The survey revealed major differences between how much contact children had with their teachers, the attendance requirements each day and the extent to which schools used digital tools and “real time”-teaching through programmes like Zoom or Teams to scaffold student learning and follow up students. Especially the youngest children generally had the least contact with their teachers. While a large majority of students at the lower secondary level communicated with teachers up to several times a day, a third of the students at the primary school level only communicated with their teacher once a week or less. These numbers are concerning in an equity perspective, as the survey shows how parents of younger students were spending a significant amount of their time teaching their own kids and following them up at home. We also found that the teachers’ use of technology to facilitate online teaching tended to be very traditional, and was mostly used for individual task-based working.

The main contribution of the paper is that in addition to documenting empirically how teachers with good technological infrastructure responded very differently to the task of teaching students digitally, it raises important questions about technology in education by showing very clearly that mere access is not enough to transform teaching. The paper thus has important implications for policymakers, researchers and practitioners alike.

Author

• Marte Blikstad-Balas, University of Oslo