Interacting with a screen – the deprivation of the ‘teacher body’ during the COVID-19 Pandemic

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Abstract
Due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, teacher educators had to change the delivery mode of their teaching to online environments. In this article, we explore the changes and challenges to teacher educators’ professional practices during emergency remote teaching. Since teacher educators act as both teachers, peers and role models to their students, their professional practices involve the teaching of how to be a professional body, i.e. a ‘teacher body’. Central to professional practices are interactions consisting of both speech and bodily actions. In interviews, teacher educators express how their professional practices of teaching has been changed and challenged in relation to how they communicate with their students and how they can support them in their learning. Due to the restrictions in body language and gaze in emergency remote teaching, teacher educators do not recognise their professional body. Moreover, because of the destabilisation of their ‘teacher body’, the teacher educators find it difficult to sufficiently convey to their students what it is to be a teacher.

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