Language & Cognition seminar - Dr Vally Lytra

Teacher agency and teacher identity in online teaching and learning during the pandemic: Snapshots from Greek community schools in Switzerland

Similar to many countries around the world, in the spring of 2020 all schools in Switzerland, including community/heritage language schools, closed due to pandemic. Overnight schools across the country were called to adapt to digitally mediated forms of teaching and learning. In this presentation, I explore how Greek language teachers addressed this moment of disruption and experienced rapid change in the teaching and learning of Greek as community/heritage language. Through reflective interviews with 9 teachers and my own observations as a Greek community school parent and activist, I discuss how the digital mediation of online teaching and learning opened up new possibilities for the development of teacher agency and teacher identity. In the absence of any centralised policy guidance, support and material resources from the Greek and Swiss states, teachers worked independently and in collaborative school-based teacher networks to rethink and tailor their pedagogical practices, goals and motivations to the precarious local conditions, maintain contact and rapport with students and families and extend their own and their students’ digital repertoires. Teachers exhibited pedagogical flexibility as they reflexively examined their own practices, experimented with new digital learning environments and new ways of building a sense of Greek school/classroom community and positioned themselves and their students as co-learners. The snapshots presented can provide useful insights regarding what we can take home for the future of community languages education, short-term and long-term.