Listen to the Voices: A Reflection on How 2020 and COVID-19 Have Affected Lives

Throughout the last few months of 2019, stories of a new and deadly virus were on every news channel around the world. Many Americans saw it as foreign news, others worried about the virus’ spread, and some felt that it would be contained quickly never making it past the Atlantic or Pacific. By March of 2020, COVID-19 made its way to the United States, forcing a new normal of quarantining, remote-learning/teaching, and teleworking. Graduate students and educators of Professional Opportunities Supporting Scholarly Engagement (POSSE), a College of Education program focused on research and contributing to the educational field of discourse, came together with a notion and a desire to provide support during this challenging time. Using a Google form questionnaire, POSSE reached out to as many people throughout the United States and the world to share their experiences with the changes, good and bad, over the past year

Educators\u27 Experiences With Teaching During COVID-19: Journey of a Participatory Action Research Inquiry Team

In 2015, the United Nations (UN) issued 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs, 2030) for everyone in this world to address. The need to act on these goals was intensified in 2020 when the world faced the COVID-19 pandemic spotlighting inequitable infrastructures and systems throughout many countries. The UN, in SDG4, urges us to “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (UN, 2015, p. 21). To address this crisis, the International Council on Education for Teaching (ICET) and MESHGuides sent out a call for research to scholars across the globe to capture teacher voices and find out about their experiences with teaching during COVID-19. Members of the College of Education program Professional Opportunities Supporting Scholarly Engagement (POSSE) at Texas A&M International University initiated a participatory action research project to join them and learn about changes in educators’ professional requirements. This report delineates their journey of collecting and analyzing data on teaching during COVID-19 and shares preliminary findings. Sixteen educators were interviewed in a focus group inquiry; six qualitative researchers analyzed the data using a systematic constant comparative method of analysis (Maykut & Morehouse, 1994). Educators shared challenges encountered when transferring curriculum, strategies, and pedagogical mindsets to a virtual platform. Teachers emphasized the significance of building collaborative relationships with parents as a supportive strategy. To face the pandemic-related changes, teachers paid both physical and emotional tolls, describing feelings such as frustration, helplessness, and uncertainty. As the participatory action research inquiry and analysis was being drafted as this article, at least half of the co-authors were still juggling expectations of altered face-to-face and virtual teaching–learning experiences while identifying the multiple impacts of a pandemic that lasted an entire calendar year, overlapping two academic years, while the research team had invested the time in listening to teachers’ voices to learn how best to promote equitable quality educational experiences for all