Policy documents from OECD and UNESCO have been stressing the need to prepare students for what has been termed a VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) world. They emphasise socialemotional competencies as necessary for coping with such conditions. This qualitative research frames the COVID-19 outbreak as an extreme case of VUCA that grants the opportunity to examine whether our teacher preparation curriculum provides teacher students with these social-emotional competencies that they are expected to model and are necessary for coping with such circumstances. Fifty-four student teachers and 24 teacher educators responded to open-ended questionnaires, and 16 semi-structured interviews with teacher educators were analysed based on grounded theory. Results demonstrate that our student teachers struggle substantially with VUCA circumstances and do not seem to receive sufficient preparation in the domain of social-emotional competencies. These troubling findings serve as a wake-up call to increase a social-emotional orientation in teacher education curriculum.
In order to increase student performance, governments stress the importance of standardization for teaching which is seen as a threat to teachers' professionalism. In this small-scale study we investigated the way teachers use their professional space in these changing circumstances. We studied eighteen cases of secondary education teachers indepth, using observations, interviews, and storylines. Our analyses revealed two types of trajectories which can be characterized by bounded and contested agency. In both trajectories the importance of personal factors and environmental factors were acknowledged. Insights into the relation between perceived space and agency can promote our understanding of teacher professionalism.
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