Teachers’ digital competences in the first educational policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis in four countries

Abstract

With the sudden widespread closure of schools since February-March 2020 due to the physical distancing measures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital competences became a focus of attention, being of central importance to the swift and equitable transition to the various forms of emergency remote teaching implemented throughout the world as a strategy to insure continuity in education. This almost instantaneous mass shift to teaching online has made transparent great disparities in how digital competences – particularly those of teachers - were conceptualized, taught and assessed within various educational programs. We present a comparative analysis of the approaches to teachers’ learning and professional development that state and non-state actors in four Central and East European countries have articulated in the first months of COVID-19 related lockdown. We take a Critical Frame Analysis approach to exploring the roles played by state and non-state actors in the four countries in conceptually framing the relationship between the digital competences required in emergency remote teaching and teachers’ learning and professional development at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. It is suggested that the educational policy debate at the beginning of the crisis rendered visible: a) that this massive sudden shift required understanding digitalization as a complex multifaceted process requiring levels of digital and pedagogical competence teachers were unlikely to have previously developed; b) that addressing these issues through short-term interventions would only exacerbate the risk of ignoring arising equity issues; c) that situating emergency measures in the context of potential medium and long-term developments could open opportunities to explore mainstreaming the digitalization of education and promoting blended learning, as well as offer a better perspective on issues of digital poverty and the inequitable impact of not addressing it adequately will have in the future

Keywords

• digital competences
• teachers’ learning and professional development
• emergency remote teaching