Digital teaching as the new normal? Swedish upper secondary teachers’ experiences of emergency remote teaching during the COVID-19 crisis

ERT in the context of Swedish upper secondary education

The backdrop of this study is Swedish upper secondary schools. In Sweden, almost all adolescents attend upper secondary school, either in programmes preparing for university studies or in vocational training programmes, and most teachers meet students with a relatively broad variation in terms of social backgrounds and educational needs. Similarly to the situation in other Nordic countries, Swedish education has a long tradition of being considered as a key to the development of a fair and equal society supporting democratic values, welfare and life-long learning under the credo one-school-for-all (Blossing et al., 2014; Klette, 2018). Even though challenged due to reforms regarding school choice, academic performance and the influence of global competition between schools (Lundahl, 2016, Telhaug et al. 2006), the idea of a Nordic model of education is still based on a vision that schools should be inclusive, comprehensive and non-tracked until as high an age as possible.

As the solutions to the challenges brought by the crisis are to a large extent digitally mediated, another backdrop is digitalisation of education. In a European perspective, use of and access to information and communications technology (ICT) prevail in Swedish classrooms at a level above average in the OECD countries (OECD, 2020). Previous studies on digitalisation show that digital technologies generally have the potential to dissolve the borders between in-school and out-of-school learning as the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of instruction changes (Erstad and Sefton-Green, 2013; Kumpulainen and Rajala, 2017; Sahlström et al., 2019). Digital tools (platforms, web resources and so on) loosen the frames between formal and informal learning, and hence make it possible to use also tools more associated with leisure (blogs, social media, chat services and so on) for educational purposes. Further, studies of digital educational settings show that students’ identities may both coincide and clash when the private sphere and the public sphere overlap (e.g. Kumpulainen and Mikkola, 2014; Vigmo and Lantz-Andersson, 2014). Allen et al. (2020) note that while there is a wide range of digital tools, online teaching seems to lead to a return to more traditional ways of instruction, and Biesta (2019) notices that

Knowledge about the effects of the pandemic and ERT are still limited, and mostly based on reports and surveys from official stakeholders like the UNESCO, OECD or national agencies. According to the Swedish Schools Inspectorate (2020), principals of upper secondary schools in Sweden report that the transition to digitally mediated teaching in general worked well. The principals had, over a short period of time during school lockdown, managed to create a reasonably functional structure for their teachers’ working situation, as well as for the students’ learning. Already available digital tools in schools worked sufficiently well to make the transition from ordinary teaching to ERT. Also, the Swedish National Agency for Education published a report in August 2020, describing preliminary results on how schools have been affected in times of ERT. They conclude that some things have worked fairly well (for instance, the students’ grades have not decreased), but the overall impression is still worrying (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2020). The teachers’ workload increased, the compensatory assignment of schools had been more difficult to accomplish, and special needs education deteriorated. This pattern corresponds with the overall picture of how the COVID-19 pandemic has challenged education in many OECD countries (Schleicher, 2020).

From the academic field, Sahlberg (2020) discusses the long-term consequences of the pandemic and ERT for education and schooling. He thinks that the need to adapt to some level of online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic will highlight many of the problems within school systems that we are already aware of, in terms of social inequities, unequal access to digital resources, and a dominance of traditional teaching, which makes school development difficult. He points out two main issues that stakeholders need to address: first, the need to work more on reducing inequalities in education; and second, the need to put more trust in teachers and principals in relation to decisions on how to improve teaching, including how to organise teaching during school closures. These issues, Sahlberg argues, were important before the crisis, and will also continue to be so after it. Hollweck and Doucet (2020), on the other hand, take a more optimistic stance when they discuss the pandemic from a Canadian viewpoint as an opportunity to rethink the future of schooling. They do not wish to go back to ‘normal’ teaching, since what used to be normal teaching never served all students well and equitably. Williamson et al. (2020) reflect upon how remote forms of teaching during the pandemic have constituted ‘frontline emergency service’ (107) and point out that it is to be understood as a re-location of digital pedagogies. There are several issues of importance, one of them being how the pandemic has revealed a significant variety in digital access and digital competence across schools and educational systems. This fact, they argue, has to be examined more broadly, also in relation to social inequalities (see also Morgan, 2020). Another aspect that Williamson et al. (2020) bring to the fore concerns how remote teaching during the school lockdown radically changes spatial and temporal relations of teaching and learning. In line with this, Stenliden et al. (2020) highlight, in a preprint of a study based on action research during ERT, how digital solutions intervene in the material framing of teaching and challenge the bodily tools with which interaction and communication are mediated in the ordinary classroom. They argue that if education as a field is going to gain something from this pandemic event, there is a need to understand remote teaching beyond results in terms of what is possible to measure and instead to a higher degree embrace teachers’ qualitative experiences and reflective thinking. In line with these researchers, we think that more empirical studies are needed that can deepen our understanding of the consequences of the pandemic, and the present work aims to contribute with such an empirical study from a teacher perspective.

Understanding teachers’ narratives about ERT

In this interview study, the rapid transition to online teaching is the reason for the conversations between researchers and teachers, where digitalisation policies form a background and a necessary condition for the transition taking place. This specific period of ERT is the general context of the course of events that teachers and researchers work together to interpret in the interviews. We take a narrative approach (Bamberg, 1997; De Fina et al., 2006; Mishler, 1999) to understanding teachers’ experiences of this specific and unique period of time, based on their accounts in a series of interviews. From such a perspective, narratives are understood as practical accomplishments and as acts of performances (Mishler, 1999), that represent a particular occasion in the form of a story. In Mishler’s terms, narratives are to be seen as purposeful and reflexive praxis and as ‘socially situated actions; identity performances; fusions of form and content’ (18). Here, this means that the teachers’ re-tellings of their experiences in response to our (the researchers’) questions are understood as narratives that take into account a multitude of contextual factors such as how they understand the purpose of the study and interpersonal aspects in the meeting itself. Their narratives could also be constructed in relation to what participants expect to be shared discursive knowledge, or discursive frames, in relation to teaching in this specific situation. This means that in our understanding of the interviews, we must attend to the teachers’ stories as more than texts representing a certain content in their experiences, but also take into account dimensions of form and how the teachers’ accounts are produced in the specific situation using structures and discourses in the surrounding context. Hence, Mishler’s (1999) view on narrative as praxis counters a view on discourses as grand master narratives and structures that speak through a person. Instead, we view discourses as shared understandings, or shared narratives, that people use as social and cultural resources to interpret, make meaning of and perform their lived experiences. This focus will not only help us understand the ERT period as such, but it will also, as Sahlberg (2020) highlights, make visible important knowledge about needs in upper secondary education also beyond the crisis.

The interview study

In line with our narrative approach, the interviews follow the characteristics of qualitative research interviews (e.g. Holstein and Gubrium, 2012; Kvale and Brinkman, 2014), and we have followed teachers of history, mathematics and Swedish at the upper secondary level (five from each subject) in three interviews between April 2020 and September 2020. The selection is based on an availability sampling procedure where we used our networks of schools (for instance, schools connected to teacher education) and asked teachers in these schools to contribute to the study. The teachers worked at 11 different schools (250–2000 students). The schools were situated both in small towns (< 30,000 inhabitants) and in large cities (> 500,000 inhabitants), and had different municipality or independent school organisers.

An interview guide was constructed containing background questions (position and subjects; formal training; years as teacher), and themes guided by six main topics: (a) how the teaching is organised during ERT; (b) possibilities and challenges of using digital tools such as learning management systems during ERT; (c) subject-specific issues regarding teaching during ERT; (d) social aspects of teaching and supporting students during ERT; (e) challenges and possibilities regarding online classroom interaction during ERT; and (f) issues of assessment. Each theme contained a set of sub-questions allowing for the theme to be explored further. The interview guide allowed for a semi-structured design giving a general overview of the interviewees’ experiences during ERT, as well as allowing each interviewee to bring up his or her own thoughts. The interview guide was adapted before the second and third interview respectively (questions were reformulated to fit different phases of ERT), but the themes were kept. Each one of the authors was responsible for a group of participants, and conducted all interviews with them. The interviews varied in length between 25 and 50 minutes and the third interview was on average shorter than the first 2. The plan was to interview each teacher twice during spring 2020, at the beginning of the ERT period and after about six weeks of ERT. A follow-up interview was conducted in early September. However, only 12 teachers followed through the whole series, resulting in a total of 41 interviews (see Table 1).

Table 1. Overview of the participants including dates of interviews.

The interviews were conducted via a video-conference tool (Zoom), a choice mainly due to the pandemic restrictions that made it difficult to meet face to face. There is still limited research about video conferences as a method, but Archibald et al. (2019) find that Zoom is a viable tool for qualitative interviews that permits the participants to communicate with each other, as well as show and share documents or other teaching resources. This opportunity was used by some of the interviewees but not all. Using Zoom also made it possible for us to have a broader geographical sample, which would otherwise have been difficult to accomplish due to the pandemic restrictions. A critical aspect of using systems like Zoom, pointed out by Archibald et al., has to do with the safe storage of personal data and the risk of sensitive data becoming accessible to unauthorised persons in cloud-based solutions. However, such risks were minimised in this study. For our analysis we only needed audio recordings, hence we used separate unconnected audio recorders that were placed beside the computer.

Analysis of pedagogical considerations during ERT

Here in the results section we begin by giving an overview of the interviews that serves as a backdrop for analysis. The analysis is then organised in relation to the three recurring themes that were identified in the first step of the analysis. As described above, we conducted the interviews with the video-conference system Zoom on three separate occasions, forming a trajectory from the beginning of the ERT period during mid-spring to the beginning of the autumn. Both as a reflection of the process and the different questions we posed, the interviews turned out to address different questions as both teachers and researchers successively changed their understanding of the ongoing development.

At the time of the first interviews, in mid-April, use of digital technology was often in focus in the interviews and there was an orientation to merely coping with the situation, finding ‘good-enough’ ways to move teaching from the physical classroom to digitally mediated spaces. As most schools had already worked with one-to-one solutions with personal computers for the students in combination with some kind of digital platform as an infrastructure for teaching, the teachers considered themselves quite well prepared in terms of technology. Most of them saw themselves as digitally competent and talked about their schools as well equipped with digital infra-structures, programs and devices also before the crisis, except for video-conference systems that for all schools had to be added in order to make online teaching possible.

In the second round of interviews, in May, the teachers had found some kind of everyday normality in the crisis, and they talked about different solutions that they had worked into new routines for teaching. The picture that emerged shows some variation between schools and teachers, in terms of routines for communication, instructions and assignments. It was clear that the teachers used not one but many different platforms and programs in their teaching. At this stage it also became more and more obvious that there were difficulties in keeping some of the students on track, and many teachers described how they tried to get in touch with students through text messages or phone calls outside the lessons. They talked about how digital efforts in combination with time-consuming student contacts resulted in a heavy workload, as they tried to find strategies for how they could be available for their students and at the same time cope with all the different kinds of information that each platform, program or app brought them.

At the time for the third round of interviews, in September, the pandemic situation was calmer and schools opened again. However, many schools still organised different kinds of hybrid forms between ordinary teaching and online teaching to lower the risk. Different groups of students were attending school on different week-days, so sometimes they had to work from home one day a week and sometimes more. Also, some schools tried to provide teaching for students staying at home with mild symptoms, which meant that in some cases teachers were expected to interact with students in the classroom and students participating online simultaneously.

The general impression from the interviews is that the technical shift itself was not that challenging. However, most teachers clearly stated that even if they coped all right with the technology, they did not consider the online teaching to be equally good as teaching conducted in the classroom, and in the third round of interviews they also looked back at the spring as a very stressful period in terms of technology. In the following analysis, organised in three overarching themes, we investigate what pedagogical considerations the teachers talk about as well as how their narratives about this are construed with a focus on the discursive frames that the teachers draw upon to perform their experiences in dialogue with the researchers. The three themes describe considerations in relation to teaching content, classroom interaction and student support.

What major discursive frames are used in the narratives?

The narrative approach to the analysis of teachers’ talk of their experiences highlights the discursive frames that the teachers rely on and use when they tell about their pedagogical considerations. These discursive frames consist of formal as well as informal norms, and sometimes show what discourses are considered superior to others. We find that there are three major discursive frames that emerge in the teachers’ stories about their teaching practices during ERT: (a) an assessment discourse with a focus on curriculum and grading; (b) a relational discourse departing from the functions of the physical classroom; and (c) a compensatory discourse when it comes to student support.

The first discourse, with its focus on assessments, curriculum and grading, is mainly used in narratives about teaching content during ERT and appears to be a discourse that is superior to other grounds for pedagogical considerations about content. The teachers prioritise central content in the syllabi and do not talk about any substantial changes of content because of the shift to ERT or the pandemic. They rely on their existing plans for the school year even if they have to find new digital tools to maintain them. The changes they do refer to have more to do with the withdrawal of the national tests, which some of them rely on for their grading and therefore have to find other ways of obtaining grading material through various assignments and tests. The shift to online teaching challenges ordinary test practices as it makes it difficult to control for cheating, which makes considerations related to testing different from the ordinary.

Second, we also find a strong relational discourse in the teachers’ talk about teaching during ERT. The different digital platforms, programs and teaching materials that are brought in and combined can hardly replace the physical possibilities of interaction in the physical classroom. We show how the teachers find it difficult to provide feedback, capture learning problems or visualise and represent a knowledge content in the digital form. We find that they refer to the physical classroom as a complex set of verbal, bodily, material and spatial aspects central to students’ learning process and knowledge development (see also Stenliden et al., 2020).

Finally, our results point to a third clearly prominent discourse that is characterised by a compensatory understanding of the teaching assignment. This is shown when teachers talk about how they actively try to find new ways of supporting all students in their learning process in line with the traditions of the Nordic school model and the ideal of ‘a school for all’ (Blossing et al., 2014). Here, the idea is to compensate for students’ different conditions and needs by providing more support to those who have the greatest need and a readiness to find different paths for different students.

Keeping up the normal: digital resources as substitutes for classroom interaction

This paper is an empirically grounded account of how Swedish upper secondary teachers, from a professional position, dealt with and made meaning of an exceptional situation – the shift to ERT due to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. In a European perspective, Swedish upper secondary education was relatively well equipped with technology, and in the interviews the teachers talk about how they have access to and use a wide range of different platforms, programs, chat forums and other digital resources in order to keep up the teaching they would have done in the ordinary classroom, had it not been for the pandemic. A short answer to our question in the title would therefore be: no – digital teaching during ERT is not the new normal but rather an effort to keep up the normal, at least what is considered to be the ideal, normal, classroom-based teaching.

In line with Sahlberg (2020), we agree that the challenges and problems that become visible during ERT are not new but represent the state of the current school system with its strengths and weaknesses. The framing discourses that we have shown in our analysis – assessment, relational and compensatory discourses – could all be understood as classical pedagogical challenges that teachers also struggled with before the crisis. The teachers’ pedagogical considerations both reflect and form what could be described as a professional discourse where many of the values associated with the so-called Nordic model (Blossing et al., 2014; Klette, 2018; Telhaug et al., 2006) can be recognised. Especially in their use of a relational and compensatory discourse, the teachers emphasise the need to interact with and understand the students in this situation, which seems to be very demanding and time-consuming to do digitally compared to the face-to-face meetings in the physical classrooms. This resonates well with the idea of one-school-for-all where schools and classrooms are not only places for teaching, but also for meetings between students with diverse backgrounds and needs.

As for the strong assessment discourse that we find, we believe that it partly reflects that the shift online occurred at the end of the school year when teachers are normally very occupied with finishing their courses and grades for the students. This assessment discourse can also be understood in the light of the changes that the governance of the Swedish school has undergone in recent decades – a shift from a competence-based curriculum to performance-based goals (Sivesind and Wahlström, 2016). Not only in Sweden, but in all of Europe and the western world, grades and assessment tend to become increasingly important, and, at a policy level, large-scale standardised tests have become important tools for creating accountability and comparison – nationally and internationally (Lingard et al., 2013). Grades also function as a basis for selection in an increasingly marketised school (Lundahl, 2016), and in the teacher interviews it is more from the perspective of the students’ need to get passing grades that assessment and grading becomes a challenge. Grading has always been a task for teachers, but what is obvious here is the strong emphasis in almost all interviews on getting enough support for grading in relation to the curriculum and course requirements. Teachers cannot simply use their knowledge about students from previous work, but need ‘proof’ in terms of test results, oral examinations or other student performances to account for the grades they decide. The ERT situation, when, for example, national tests were drawn back, challenges this discourse and makes it necessary to find new ways of getting the support needed that also includes considerations on how to avoid plagiarism and cheating. In their narratives the teachers make visible how they balance these demands of support for assessment with relational and compensatory concerns for different students, and the complexity this balance means in an all-digital environment.

As this is written, in November 2020, the pandemic seems far from over and a transition to distance education may again be called for. The crisis we have described is thus still a fact. Like several of the reports and evaluations made of the Swedish ERT period in the spring of 2020 (Swedish National Agency for Education, 2020; Swedish Schools Inspectorate, 2020), we can state that the digitisation processes that have been initiated and implemented for a long time were put to the test, and, from a technological point of view, seem to work relatively well. However, as Williamson et al. (2020) argue, there is a need for critical reflections not only on the prospects for digitalisation, but on the long-term consequences for education in general.

Our result is particularly important, we believe, in relation to the digitalisation efforts in the educational sector in Sweden as well as internationally, showing a strong belief in digitalisation as a democratic project promoting equity. Listening to the teachers’ experiences, we find it important to emphasise the need to pay more attention to the relational and interactional dimensions of the digitalisation of teaching. We also want to highlight how online teaching changes boundaries between public and private, something we believe should be paid more attention to at a policy level. During the ERT period, new conditions emerge as students participate in teaching from home, via webcams on their personal computers that the school has provided. This shows how teachers are let into the students’ home environments through the same video chat system, which in a fundamental way shifts boundaries between the students’ private domain and the school’s public sphere. We believe that this boundary shift is an important dimension to consider in relation to digitalisation strategies.

A final comment, that we think noteworthy to bring to the table, concerns the very few accounts of changes in relation to teaching content in general and specifically in relation to knowledge about the ongoing pandemic from a subject-specific perspective. Our point here is not to question the teachers’ content priorities. In light of the working situation under strong pressure in the initial phase of ERT, it is understandable that they stuck to the plans they had already made and tasks previously used. But we think that it calls for further reflection and exploration that so few expectations are brought up about the global pandemic situation as such as a matter to bring into teaching in the educational debate at large. To what extent should education and teaching be able to be more flexible and make adjustments in relation to contemporary developments in society? Are we stuck in a system where course requirements, student performance and grading criteria frame teaching so strongly that it becomes too difficult for education to address important and contemporary societal challenges, based on academic knowledge? We have no ready answer to these complex questions, but suggest that it is a topic that calls for more research, debate and discussions on many levels.