Abstract:

We are already witnessing how each and every one of us is affected by the disruptive nature of the global Coronavirus Pandemic sweeping across our Planet. These are tough times. Tougher than we have ever realised before, as the whole world is in ever increasing chaos. By the devastating consequences of the Coronavirus Pandemic, people are beginning to rebuild lives, re-orientate themselves to a ‘new normal’ emerging after months of ‘hibernation’, ‘The Great Pause’, Lockdown’. . .name it what you will. In a world, facing the global pandemic, education for well-being becomes critical at the heart of overcoming disastrously disruptive life-styles. Rapidly evolving creative learning technologies, therefore, herald a new era of ‘near future’ capacity for peoples from any place, any time-zone on our planet Earth to come together for vital inter-continental communication systems to re-educate ourselves to prepare for the ‘new normal’..

We have come to recognise how the plurality of languages, cultures, interdisciplinary professions, diversity in beliefs and values highlight the need for multi-dimensional, holistic approaches to learning and teaching. This need is not only exclusive to schools, colleges, Institutions for Higher Education but also inclusive of continuing professional development and lifelong learning in the ‘new workplace’. “Reimagining the ways in which to train pre-service teachers is a pressing task. McKinsey, (2020) states that “Executives everywhere wonder how to bring people back to the workplace and how they will do their jobs” This research paper looks at the challenges of creating a sense of belonging, common purpose, and shared identity when teachers now work from their homes during Covid-19 crises. Expressions like ‘social-distancing’, ‘self-isolating’ and ‘social bubbles’, ‘ZOOM-ins’, amongst others are becoming the everyday familiar, while ‘unknown’ in former times. It is critically necessary to be mindful that ‘history teaches us that theories change more rapidly than practice’, (Harasim, 2017:53).
Pre-pandemic, a number of researchers were exploring remote, at-a-distance and in-real-time learning afforded by technology (Somekh 2007; Kali, McKenney, and Sagy 2015). Furthermore, research also highlights how technologies frame professional learning for students and educators (Murray and Kidd 2016) or the use of online tools for teaching and personal learning (Bergviken et al. 2018; Gu and Lai 2019). This research paper is based on the evaluation of the Pedagogical Variation Model (PVM, Rogers 2013) by pre-service teacher students from Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Rio Grande do Sul (IFRS), participating in Part A of the PVM evaluation questionnaire during separate year group classes regarding the implementation of (ICT), for teaching and learning of the Natural Sciences, namely Chemistry and Biology at IFRS in October 2018 and in October 2019, respectively. Both sample groups were taught by the same lecturer, namely, Associate Professor Aline Grunewald Nichele, a co-author of this research paper. Interestingly, this collaborative research highlights significant outcomes regarding pre-service teacher students’ perceptions of matching online teaching strategies with e-learner preferences depending on their online collaborative and knowledge construction abilities, providing evidence of the opposing idea that one-size fits all; indeed, outcomes of the research reveal quite the opposite.

Keywords:

Online learning and teaching, e-learning, e-moderating, pedagogical leadership, attrition, retention, constructivist, instructivist, collaborative research.