Transforming Pedagogies during the Pandemic: Lessons from a Teacher Education Program

Proceedings of The 5th International Conference on Advanced Research in Teaching and Education

Year: 2022

DOI:

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Transforming Pedagogies during the Pandemic: Lessons from a Teacher Education Program

Tanya Manning-Lewis

 

ABSTRACT: 

Teaching literacy-based courses to teacher candidates (TCs) outside of the discipline can be quite challenging. In response to some TCs course survey comments in previous years that the Multiliteracies Across the Curriculum course content is not relevant to their teachable, the researcher decided to revamp the course. The shift to online teaching in the fall of 2020 provided a unique opportunity for the instructor to develop new pedagogical strategies to increase course engagement and relevance. These strategies included creating content through videos, graphic novels, students’ ongoing vlog/ blog post reflections, bi-weekly course reviews, and support grouping within the cohort. The researcher engaged an auto-ethnographic approach embedded in social constructivism to examine the impact of her pedagogical response to the challenges teacher candidates from different subject disciplines were experiencing in her course. The researcher utilized personal reflections (dairy), students’ anonymous bi-weekly review of the course, and the exit course survey to determine effective or ineffective strategies. The reflections, reviews and 2020 survey comments revealed that the newly developed strategies positively impacted students’ response to the course. Most students across disciplines indicated that the diverse methodologies, online learning tools, multiliterate pedagogies, practical applications and classroom community increased course relevancy, access and engagement.

keywords: Pedagogy; multiliterate strategies; teacher-candidates; pandemic; online learning.