Keywords

1 Introduction

The cultural-historical wholeness approach’s view on developmental crisis highlights its contextual character intertwining the personal, institutional and societal plans. The individual development is viewed as sometimes taking on ‘a stormy, impetuous and sometimes catastrophic character that resembles a revolutionary course of events’ (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 191). Such critical and ‘stormy’ episodes must however always be related to the demands and expectations of the institutional settings in which the individual is operating (Fleer & Hedegaard, 2010; Hedegaard, 1998, 2008). The societal plan of rules and regulations and the culturally anchored value positions and daily operations of institutions are not less important than individual experience. This means that a crisis is not only a personal or individual phenomenon but one lived in dialectics within the societal and institutional contexts. Moreover, a crisis is not only a negative and destructive force characterised by ‘disintegration and breakdown of what had been formed at preceding stages’ (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 192) but also a formative course, without which humans ‘would not have anything to strive for and, of course, would not be able to create anything’ (Vygotsky, 2004, pp. 28–29).

In this chapter, we examine early childhood teacher education (ECTE) taking ‘a revolutionary course of events’ (Vygotsky, 1998, p. 191) when dealing with the governmental demand for full digitalisation and uninterrupted continuation during the COVID-19 pandemic. What this demand implied was a total stop of the existing teaching–learning activity settings in ECTE and an uninterrupted continuation of educational programmes without new activity settings in place. The new activity settings were supposed to be established digitally in the university’s digital space, which previously only featured ongoing institutional activities and was used to store information and documentation related to teaching–learning activities. This means that due to the new regulations, the established settings related to teaching–learning activities were dissituated and transferred to holograms but were expected to function as they did before.

In this chapter, using the Cultural-historical Wholeness Approach, we reflect on teachers’ individual and institutional innovative searches and re-searches for activity settings that would allow ECTE to continue as a study programme during the COVID-19 pandemic. We start by describing the new set of rules imposed on the Norwegian university sector on March 12, 2020. Then, our study conducted among ECTE teacher educators in Norway is presented. The main themes draw on complex experiences of the dissituated ECTE, which we discuss from a cultural-historical perspective. As there were successful stories but also stories painting a picture of a secondary crisis caused by digitalisation, we argue for careful innovation underpinned by the right value-based motives allowing an extension of the situated learning.

2 Lockdown and Political Demand for Continuation of Dissituated ECTE

The lockdown prompted by the outbreak of the covid-19 pandemic imposed a set of new demands on Norwegian higher education institutions. On March 12, 2020, the Norwegian government (Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care, 2020) obligated all higher educational programmes to proceed digitally, with a clear message of no delays and no postponing of any of the milestones in students’ progression. This meant an imposed demand for both full digitalisation and uninterrupted continuation of academic programmes despite campuses’ shutdowns.

ECTE in Norway is constituted by activity settings that situate the students and teacher educators in diverse learning communities both on campus and in in-service kindergartens. The situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) underpinning the organisation of ECTE is anchored in the sociocultural perspective on learning, whose principles are in line with Hedegaard’s (1998) conclusions on cognitive apprenticeship in meaningful activity settings: ‘(a) learning should be grounded in a practical world of everyday life; (b) it is important to learn the strategies of a culture and (c) students are agents of their own learning’ (p. 117). The digitalisation of ECTE dissituated the students and teacher educators from their practical worlds consisting of learning communities and professional socialisation at the campus and in-service ECTEs. The dissituated continuation of ECTE demanded other kinds of agency, motives, competence and tools both from the teacher educators and students. What these demands were was not entirely clear at the start but unfolded in the process of trying to meet them. The process started with being thrown into a new teaching reality ‘just like that’. As one of us, teacher educators and authors of this chapter, noted during that time:

And just like that, from Monday onward, I, who can barely handle the basic functions of my own PC and avoid technology as much as possible, am supposed to lecture online, share the screen with my students, help them log in and motivate them to participate in our online activities.

The dissituated ECTE demanded that the students track the information communicated to them online, that they devote more time to self-study and that they practise more self-discipline (NOKUT, 2021). For students enrolled in the ECTE programme consisting of teamwork-based activities both at the campus and in-service early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings (Universities Norway, 2018), where learning was deeply situated in group activities, a sudden shift demanding high level of self-organisation, self-discipline and self-study was a game changer. For teacher educators, it was clear that following up on their students’ professional socialisation and continuously assessing the professional suitability of teaching activities, which ECTE teacher educators are expected to do, would be difficult in the new settings. As one of us—authors—noted about a month after the start of the implementation of full digitalisation:

Professional socialisation happens in all these learning communities and relationships among the students, in their activities in the in-service ECEC settings and in their communications with us. The core values are shared in and through being together in these diverse settings. Following up on the students in all these communities allows us and them to assess their suitability to the profession―that is, if they can work closely with other people, especially with children. How can we assess this on Zoom?

In view of the new demands, teacher educators started individual explorations of accessible digital tools. Shortly after, the university offered an array of online courses and helped the teacher educators plan digital teaching sessions.

3 ECTE Becoming a Hologram

We developed a survey questionnaire for use in determining how ECTE teacher educators at other universities and colleges in Norway dealt with the new demands and what solutions they created to safeguard situated learning under the dissituated ECTE. Copies of it were distributed in June 2020 among all institutions in Norway offering ECTE programmes, and 120 teacher educators answered the questionnaire. As the number of respondents was not representative of the population of teacher educators, we focused on a qualitative analysis of the free-text answers to the question ‘What were your experiences as a teacher of the digitalised ECTE?’ The analysis followed Hedegaard’s (2008) three levels of interpretation:

  1. 1.

    Common sense interpretation

  2. 2.

    Situated practice interpretation

  3. 3.

    Thematic interpretation

The answers draw a thematic landscape of the teacher educators’ very diverse ways of dealing with the new demands of the dissituated ECTC. As presented in Fig. 17.1, the informants experienced being in a demanding and developmental process. However, they perceived their development as an irrelevant mastering and a private pleasure or learning of new things, ‘while the digital ECTC as an educational programme was not living up to the ECTE guidelines’ (informant 104).

Fig. 17.1
An illustration. It has teacher educator experiences of E C T E digitalization in quotes from several informants under a few broad categories. Some find it professionally, logically, and emotionally demanding, some find it personally developmental and challenging, while others find it irrelevant.

Overview of qualities of teacher educators’ demanding–developmental experiences of ECTE digitalisation

Full size image

What was experienced as particularly demanding was enhancing and sustaining interactions between the ‘talking heads’ and ‘black screens’. The lack of interaction and reactions from the students made the teacher educators insecure about the students’ understanding of the transmitted content, and thus blocked the ‘natural’ process of making spontaneous adjustments and providing extra explanations. The lack of interaction during teaching sessions also demanded more work from the teachers, such as preparing scripts so that the necessary knowledge would be transmitted and long moments of silence could be avoided.

The developmental experiences were connected to institutional practices where teacher educators responsible for particular courses initiated digital meetings in which experiences and emerging digital pedagogies were exchanged. Additionally, many universities’ arranged courses for the educators and lecturers, introducing new digital teaching tools. These were also seen as a learning experience, allowing to try synchronous and asynchronous teaching forms and explore the new Zoom function of ‘breakout rooms’, which allowed the students to interact in smaller groups with the camera on, thus with less anonymity and greater responsibility. Developing new digital skills that enabled good digital sessions on Zoom made some of the teacher educator respondents very proud of themselves and their own learning. However, many of them also emphasised that their own joyful mastering of new digital skills was not relevant to providing their students with a good, socially situated education because a digital teaching session cannot replace the social settings through which ECTE facilitates the professional development of pre-service teachers.

Figure 17.1 presents the diverse ways in which the respondents experienced the digitalisation/dissituation of ECTE as demanding and developmental, which is in line with Vygotsky’s (1998, 2004) understanding of dealing with crises as disruption and development in relation to new demands.

4 From Private to Collective Innovating

From a cultural-historical perspective, the responses pointing out the significance of ‘coming together’ and sharing experiences of being a teacher on the hologram of the university are highly interesting. This ‘coming together’ initiated by teacher educators responsible for particular courses can be interpreted as a new, emerging activity setting on the ‘hologram university’, allowing meaningful, collective meta-reflection on the ongoing dissituated teaching–learning processes. The correspondence between the activity setting’s demand for sharing and the commonly experienced need for sharing made this activity setting particularly meaningful for teacher educators. The meaningfulness and relational character of the activity setting seemed to have allowed teacher educators to situate their dissituated teaching experiences and their new, still ‘dissituated’ digital knowledge transmitted during their massive coursing. As one informant experienced:

I was thankful for the course leader-initiated meetings among the teacher educators involved in that course. It was there that I understood the breakout rooms, which I didn’t get during the course I was attending. Hearing how others implemented them in their teaching motivated me to try them. However, I struggled with motivating the students and finding a setting that could allow ‘live’ group work, like that in the classroom. (Informant 72)

The aforementioned activity setting, by being one more activity setting ‘on the hologram’, also seemed to facilitate the teacher educators’ sense of belonging to the dissituated university and a sense of togetherness with other teacher educators, even though they were not able to meet them physically. However, not all of the teacher educators met in such teams, and some of them experienced metacommunication about the digital teaching sessions only with the students:

The courses I was attending to improve my digital skills transmitted information about the new tools and how to use them incredibly fast, so I was not able to discuss the didactic use of the tools with my colleagues. My dialogues with the students were more about trying synchronous and asynchronous teaching. I was glad about that, but I knew I was missing a deeper didactic discussion. (Informant 1)

The ongoing ‘digital didactics’ was briefly and superficially discussed at the start of diverse meetings, while waiting until everyone had logged in, fixed their audio settings, and dealt with other preliminaries. The motive of discussing the sudden digitalisation of professional education and its consequences led us to contribute to a sociological blog (Haukenes & Sollesnes, 2020; Sjursen & Hjelle, 2020) run by the University of Bergen and document the functioning of different social institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Working with the texts of our conference presentations on that subject (Sadownik et al., 2020a, b) and creating the survey questionnaire constituted another digital activity setting for us, situating our explorations and experiences of dissituated teaching experiences at the hologram university.

The aforementioned digital activity settings strengthened the teacher educators’ sense of belonging to the ‘hologram’ and their sense of its reality. The digital university was no longer ‘just a representation’ of the institution but the institution itself. Moreover, the teacher educators were no longer lonely in their explorations of digital teaching. They were there together, bound together by the feeling of contributing to the continuation of society and its institutions. In time, the teacher educators were able to master the digital technologies and started realising that it would be easier for them to focus on the stories of their successes in their own learning, the happy-ending stories of their students completing their education on time and positive experiences of the teaching sessions. The teacher educators obviously missed the physical meetings and spontaneous chats and coffee breaks on campus, but they organised morning coffee and lunch breaks on Zoom app, making their days on the hologram very comfortable. The success stories that strengthened and rewarded their efforts were about the following:

  • Students making the most of their study time during the pandemic by joining the teaching sessions via Zoom from their tents on mountaintops or amid other spectacular nature scenes, thanks to mobile data

  • Students taking responsibility for their own learning during the pandemic and entering Zoom sessions very well prepared, ready to get the most from the digital lectures

  • Contacting students who wrote bachelor’s theses on similar topics so that they could meet digitally and discuss their writing processes together

  • Moments when students’ ‘black screens’ eventually revealed the ‘talking heads’

  • Our scripts for the teaching sessions that allowed us to communicate the most important knowledge and avoid long moments of silence

  • Our experiences of collaboration with MediaLab at our university that allowed us to make high-quality videos for asynchronous teaching.

The aforementioned stories shared supported the teacher educators’ motive of continuation and were in line with the demands and rewards communicated by their institute’s leaders. Messages acknowledging the great digital job that the teacher educators were doing were sent regularly. Additionally, the university organised home-delivered flowers to thank the teacher educators for their efforts and during whole-day digital meetings, tasteful lunches/breakfasts were delivered at their doors. They were no longer alone on the hologram; they were together as teacher educators.

5 A Crisis of Irrelevant Innovation

Another theme developed in the analysis of the free-text survey data: irrelevant mastering is also very interesting and worthy of reflection from the perspective of the cultural-historical approach. Utterances on irrelevant competence development leading to irrelevant ECTE seemed possible when the teacher educators’ activities in the (joyful) activity settings on the hologram were related to value positions underpinning ECTE’s original pre-pandemic guidelines and rules and stories of students who ‘dropped out’ of the ‘hologram university’. The following are examples of such responses, which we classified under the theme of ‘irrelevant mastering’:

I’m very proud of my own digital development, but we delivered a bad-quality, cheap digital replacement of ECTE. (Informant 72)

Professional socialisation did not take place. We had no idea what values and attitudes the students were developing, and we had no basis for assessing their suitability for the profession. (Informant 25)

Reading the aforementioned quotes and others like them made us reflect on how the teacher educators’ joy due to their own digital learning and their success in meeting the governmental demands displaced their worries about the quality of the delivered education. The joy of own digital development also removed from the picture the perspective of the students who slowly ‘dropped out’ from the dissituated ECTE programme. The administration pegged the number of students dropping out of the ECTE programmes at the university’s three campuses at 104, with the number typically oscillating from two to seven students per year.

According to a NOKUT (2021) report, 10% of all students in Norway had the responsibility of taking care of their own or other children in the family during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, among ECTE students, over 25% needed to take care of children (NOKUT, 2021, p. 48). Moreover, only 25% of the ECTE students in Norway declared having a suitable place for participating in digital education; 27% declared not having such a place, and 48% declared not having a place that was suitable enough for such a purpose (NOKUT, 2021, p. 49). Neither were the students’ economic situations optimal. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many of them lost their jobs and had to find new jobs that did not allow them to participate in their studies as before. Moreover, loneliness, decreasing motivation and significantly deteriorating mental health escalated among students across educational programmes (NOKUT, 2021). Students clearly missed engaging with each other in activity settings that were in line with the ECTE guidelines. Not only did the transition to the hologram fail to develop activity settings that could match the real-life ones and impose the demands of self-discipline, self-studying and self-responsibility for one’s learning, but it also denied universal access to a suitable place and infrastructure for digital learning (NOKUT, 2021) because not all students had these.

As mentioned earlier, in the case of ECTE, the new demands were very different from the original ones. Specifically, situated, relationship-based education happening through participation and learning in teams demanded being a good team member or leader and having good communication skills, empathy and flexibility in terms of the group process. The sudden change in demands, highlighting self-leadership, self-discipline and the minimalisation of the societal context to breakout rooms, made some of the originally well-functioning students into demotivated and isolated individuals struggling with situating themselves on the hologram. Those who ‘did well’ in the digitalised setup claimed they would learn much more on open campuses and with on-campus physical learning/teaching activities (NOKUT, 2021).

The general impression of reduced learning under the dissituated ECTE could be connected to another kind of learning that became dominant during the asynchronous video lectures and the better scripts that synthesised what the students needed to know to be able to take exams without delay and that allowed them to avoid uncomfortable moments of silence during teaching sessions. Through the practice of developing more detailed scripts of what should be ‘transmitted and communicated to the students’, the teaching sessions became more dyadic, with the knowledgeable teacher actively communicating the knowledge to passive learners (Hedegaard, 1998). The teaching sessions transformed from socially situated and dialogical into knowledgeable monologues.

Although the teacher educators focused on creating meaningful and situated problems (Hedegaard, 1998) to be discussed in breakout rooms, the students could not relate the discussed problems/cases to experiences ‘within the culture of practitioners’ because they did not have access to in-service ECEC settings (Hedegaard, 1998, p. 116). They were learning ‘without the culture of practitioners’ and without the campus community of pre-service teachers and academics. Their learning, based on the teacher educators’ knowledge transmission, became dissituated, disconnected and thus demotivating to participate in. As one of the teacher educators stated:

I received several messages from the students saying that they had nothing to talk about in the breakout rooms. They wrote that they found it difficult to relate the questions or task to the literature and that the task was meaningless because they lacked practical experience. Some mentioned that even if they passed all the exams without delay, they wouldn’t become good early-year teachers. (Informant 23)

The aforementioned quote and other critical responses of teacher educators need to be taken seriously when reflecting on the (un)innovative qualities developed during forced digitalisation.

6 The Danger of Neoliberal Motives Colonising Digitalisation

Despite the critical responses of teacher educators, the digitalisation of ECTE was officially communicated as a success. ‘We did it!’ was proclaimed in many proud e-mails from the institute leader and the dean. Rapid digitalisation started as an imposed demand, but it eventually became an internalised motive, and the fact that the great majority of students completed their studies without delay (NOKUT, 2021) drives us to consider digitalisation successful. The successful experience is mentioned in White Paper No. 5 (2022–2023) on long-term planning for research and higher education, which states that further digitalisation will make higher education accessible for everyone from every place in Norway (p. 21).

However, looking at the motive of digitalisation after the pandemic through the lens of the cultural-historical wholeness approach will enable us to see it in the context of the other motives and values underpinning it. The motive of making higher education accessible to all is in line with egalitarian values and sustainable thinking, but the fact that situated activity settings are crucial for fostering knowledgeable and ethical professionals under ECTE sheds a different light on the programme’s digitalisation. The facts and empirical examples draw a picture of the full digitalisation of ECTE as an unfair reduction of important professional experiences, risking sending ‘quasi-qualified’ professionals to ECEC settings.

However, a digitalised ECTE will definitely be cheaper, and as temporary academia is highly entangled with neoliberal capitalism, we cannot exclude the possibility that some processes are underpinned by economic rather than ethical values. To safeguard the quality of ECTE, we advocate future innovations supporting crucial learning relationships and using digital tools to support and replace sociality.