Reacting, Re-learning and Reflecting on Sudden Pedagogical Adaptations

In the COVID-19 period, teachers and learners across the globe face great challenges, not only physically, mentally, but also pedagogically. The pandemic forced most teachers to move from classroom-based to online teaching within a matter of weeks. That is, the sudden revaluation of pedagogy pushed teachers to make quick adaptations to online teaching, willingly or not. Against this backdrop, this chapter unpacks the challenges of two language teachers at a university in Hong Kong. We adopt a narrative inquiry approach to investigate the lived experience of the teachers who went through this unprecedented period of time. Teacher A is a highly experienced classroom teacher yet a non-digital native while Teacher B is a digital native but with limited teaching experience. Teacher A taught a language skills and strategies course to BA English majors, while Teacher B taught a Business English course to non-English majors. Drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s (The ecology of human development: experiments by nature and design. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1979) ecosystem model, we examine the teachers’ needs and challenges in order to understand their experiences from the micro-, meso- and exo-systems perspectives. The study provides implications on what universities and teacher educators can do in order to better offer in-service teacher training and support to teachers for future online teaching scenarios. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.