Conference Agenda

The status of teachers is a matter of concern in many countries. Local studies and international surveys indicate that the status of teachers and the teaching profession is in constant decline (e.g., Clarke, 2016; Stromquist, 2018). While the factors affecting this situation vary from country to country, the consequences are the same, whereby teaching becomes a secondary profession less favored by qualified young people. Therefore, it is no surprise that many education systems around the world have reported an ongoing acute shortage of teachers resulting from the difficulty in recruiting and retaining good teachers over time (OECD, 2018; 2020; Schleicher, 2012; UNESCO, 2022).

Covid-19 has made an immense impact on the education systems around the world (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020). School closures required teachers to rapidly adapt to remote teaching while catering to their students’ social and emotional needs. Switching to online learning allowed parents and the public to observe the work of teachers for the first time closely. While many appreciated the hard work of teachers and commended them for their contribution during this time of crisis, teachers were harshly criticized by the public and the media as lazy and scaremongers as well as voiceless and disrespected (Asbury & Kim, 2020). Since it has been argued that the economic and social shock presented by the Covid-19 pandemic is likely to reshape perceptions of individuals and organizations about work and occupations and result in both micro and macro shifts in the world of work (Kramer & Kramer, 2020), it remains to be investigated whether the Covid-19 period has changed public's perceptions towards the status of teachers and the teaching profession.

The status of teachers and the teaching profession can be examined from two perspectives: social esteem and social prestige (Hoyle, 2001). Social esteem refers to the value attached to the profession and to the qualities of the practitioners of this occupation. The profession’s value is influenced by how the public perceives its importance, necessity, and contribution to society and by how the public perceives the professional skills, virtues, and qualities of those engaged in this profession (Bahar et al., 2018; Hoyle, 2001).

Social prestige is defined as the public's perceptions of the relative position of an occupation in a hierarchy of occupations. The prestige, measured on a scale, is often influenced by external factors such as salary and work conditions, the difficulty of entering the profession, the possibilities for occupational progress and professional development, and the degree of autonomy given to the professionals (Ben-Peretz, 2009). Studies show that there tends to be a gap between the prevailing positive perception regarding the importance and contribution of the teaching profession versus the low social prestige of teachers compared to other professionals such as doctors, engineers, and lawyers (Hargreaves & Flutter, 2019).

The present study focuses on the status of teachers and the teaching profession during Covid-19 in the Israeli context. The status of Israeli teachers has been declining for many years. Despite several structural reforms in the employment conditions of teachers, their salaries, especially those of beginning teachers, remained low (Zerd, 2019). In an international survey of the Global Teacher Status Index (GTSI) which compared the status of teachers in 35 countries, Israel was ranked 34^th, one before the last (Dolton et al., 2018). The present study aimed to examine whether there has been a change due to the corona crisis in how the Israeli public perceives the status of teachers and the teaching profession – both social esteem and social prestige.

Educating students to be active agents in disrupting systematic inequalities in educational settings is paramount, and hotly debated in the teacher education literature (e.g., Cochran-Smith, 2020) with the inequalities highlighted by the pandemic bringing fresh calls for social justice to be fore-fronted in teacher education (Mikolai, Keenan & Kulu, 2020; Ellis, Steadman & Mao, 2020). In this paper we examine education students’ understandings of social justice in two cohorts, who started their course either just prior to or during the pandemic. Taking the above into account, this paper seeks to explore the following questions: (1) What are students’ lived experiences of social justice as they negotiate their placements and university teaching sessions during the pandemic and (2) How do these differ for students who started before and during the pandemic?
Teaching for social justice in any teacher education programme is a complex process. This is because as teacher educators, we socially construct our knowledge of the curriculum and our teaching practices to best meet the needs of our learners. The outcomes of our teacher education programmes therefore, cannot be known at the time of our curriculum design and delivery as our student teachers are also constructing their own meanings. A recent review highlighted the common themes of ‘equity-related advocacy’ and concerns with ‘justice’ as well as the importance of the particular social and political contexts at any particular moment in time (Cochran-Smith, 2020). With this in mind, we sought to investigate students’ perceptions not only of social justice, but also of their awareness of the social and political contexts in which social justice may be claimed, constructed and worked toward.

The Covid-19 pandemic has inevitably produced wide-reaching, global implications on practice, teaching and learning, and infrastructure within higher education settings (Farnell, Matijevic & Schmidt, 2021). This time has further highlighted inequalities present in schools and exacerbated long-standing structural and societal inequalities for everyone (Mikolai, et al., 2020). Bozkurt & Sharma (2021) viewed this time as a period for reflection and the potential for educational reform. Specifically, they suggest that this time would allow educators to critically evaluate much-used pedagogical process and provide an opportunity to disrupt traditional approaches to teaching. In turn, this would allow for a re-focus towards promoting equity, social justice, and person-centred focus in teaching to come. Others suggest that while educators cannot make systemic changes alone, they must now prioritise guaranteeing the rights and voices of all children and emphasising representation in their teaching (Tarabini, 2021).

These suggested directions for change are also beginning to be reflected directly in universities and schools. One teacher education program presented their re-framed approaches to teaching and learning as a response to the pandemic (Hill, Rosehar, St. Helene & Sadhra, 2020). The authors describe an active re-envisioning of their teacher education, with social justice at the centre. For example, focusing on dismantling systemic inequalities and racism, decolonising the curriculum and prioritising wellbeing and mental health in schools. Similarly, in a small-scale interview study with leaders in teacher education at universities in four regions of the world, staff were overwhelmingly in favour of changes and innovation (Ellis et al., 2020). Many participants made commitments to prioritising areas relating to social justice, however one further question was how to ensure this new stance was maintained in the following years. It is now crucial to build on our previous work (Jones, Eady and Craig, 2022) to understand if such changes following the Covid-19 pandemic have been carried forward and implemented, and to what extent changes arising from COVID-19 are reflected in the way that Education students themselves, talk about and consider social justice.

In recent decades, teacher trainings (TT) were studied with regard to their effectiveness and their contributions to school and classroom development. Large meta-analyses examined various characteristics of TT to identify best practices (cf. Harris & Sass, 2011). TT differ in their objectives and therefore can affect different areas. Lipowsky (2020) arranged these areas of influence hierarchically into a layered model: teachers’ reaction, teachers’ learning, teachers’ practice, student outcome and school development. However, the effectiveness of TT is not only influenced by the event itself, but takes place in a complex system which can be related to the utilization of learning opportunities model (Brühwiler et al., 2017). To what extend the different areas influence each other and interact remains a major research desideratum.

Teachers’ attitudes and beliefs move into focus when it comes to implementations in school. For both usage of digital media and technology the importance of teachers attitude and beliefs could be empirically proven (cf. Li et al., 2019). In both cases the attitudes relate directly to the innovation. However, some studies take a broader look at attitudes in the context of teachers’ technology and curriculum implementation, finding that both subject and surroundings shape teachers’ attitudes (cf. Mertala, 2019). When it comes to specific subject TT it remains unclear how teachers’ beliefs affect the implementation. We developed an evaluated TT which enables teachers to carry out standard methods of molecular biology and implement these in school, e.g. polymerase chain reaction (Nerdel & Schöppner, 2021). The methods are embedded in different models of curricular valid contexts to increase acceptance by teachers (Schöppner et al., 2022). In general the trainings’ realization was oriented at known implementation barriers and their reduction (cf. Gräsel, 2010). Subsequently, teachers can borrow the equipment free of charge. Some teachers implemented the training successfully into their classroom or even their school curriculum (Großbruchhaus et al., submitted). In theory the implementation barriers remain the same for all participating teachers. However, some implement the training right away and others don’t. This study aims at further insights into teachers’ reasoning.

Therefore, we interviewed 39 teachers of whom 20 implemented the training. We coded each interview with a category system based on existing research insights (cf. Gräsel, 2010). The emerging system contained seven main categories with several sub-categories. Subsequently, we analyzed each category inductively to reveal the subtleties of the arguments used.

We found huge differences in attitudes between the teacher groups who implemented and who didn’t. Identified differences include either the whole perception of or the given importance to a feature, which leads to distinguish argumentative patterns while using the same arguments. In this paper we focus on the two categories system features and values and beliefs.

When it comes to system features three main arguments are used: national curriculum, time and taught classes. However, the intercorrelations and perception of those vary. For instance, the division of the curriculum into subthemes opens flexibility to some teachers’ while others perceive the order as fixed arguing that the subtheme into which the training fits lays in an inappropriate time frame of the year for implementation. This perception differences influences other areas, e.g. corporation as teachers view the flexibility every teacher has as burden to never find the same time frame teaching that curriculum subtheme. All together the implementation barriers with their different weighting form a complex network of argumentative structure. This demonstrates the huge influence of attitudes on implementation of teaching innovation maybe even independent from the training itself. Future studies should examine to what extend their implementation procedure is influenced or shaped by teachers’ beliefs and attitudes beyond the trainings’ topic.