The elephant in the (class)room: Emergency Remote Teaching in an ecological perspective

Abstract

ABSTRACT Most teachers are working from home and using digital tools to mediate their classes as a response to a demand for transitioning face-to-face to online classes due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing on the ecological approach, this paper reports a qualitative study that aims to understand how digital technologies are integrated in the teaching practices during the Emergency Remote Teaching. Seventy-six language teachers answered a quasi-structured questionnaire about their experiences. The findings show how the network created with their peers scaffolded this experience and played a crucial role in their appropriation of those technologies. Moreover, the findings suggest that this network may have contributed to the “normalisation” of digital technology use.

Keywords

• Emergency Remote Teaching
• ecological perspective
• normalisation
• language teaching
• digital technologies
• smartphones