Pandemic Pedagogy: How Early Career Agriculture Teachers Reflect on Their Practice

Abstract

In a struggle to cope with school closures and shifting instructional paradigms from face-to-face to virtual, agriculture teachers across the United States were drastically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. We sought to understand how early-career agriculture teachers (ECATs) in California reflected on their teaching experience before and during the transition through February, March, and April 2020. Our work was guided by Pedagogical Design Capacity (Brown & Edelson, 2003) and the Discovery Learning® Change Process Model (Musselwhite & Jones, 2010) to explore the lived experiences of ECATS during the initial transition from face-to-face instruction to Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT). In this qualitative inquiry, the data illuminate how ECATs in California spent time reflecting on their reactions to mandates with raw emotion and how they are driven to change their teaching practice in novel ways. The data further reveal how ECATs cope with crises while supporting the fundamental socio-cultural needs of their students. The data lead us to better understand how ECATs leverage their networks and curricular resources to keep their students engaged in the absence of the traditional in-person instructional environment. The ECATs in this study also exhibited tendencies of resilience that impacted their experience during this teaching transition. Recommendations are discussed around understanding the process teachers undergo, triggered by a traumatic event, to return life to some form of homeostasis for themselves and their students.