Ongoing research into Initial Teacher Education lecturers’ understanding of online teaching

This paper provides an overview of my ongoing PhD research into Initial Teacher Education (ITE) lecturers’ understanding of the phenomenon of online ITE teaching using a phenomenographic approach. The ITE sector has
experienced a series of significant changes in recent years (Murtagh et al., 2021). As a spatialised enterprise (Ryan, 2011),
face to face ITE teaching was significantly disrupted during the Covid lockdowns as the highly dialogic pedagogy required
to deliver this subject was moved online (Moorhouse, 2020). This forced virtualisation requires a fundamental review of
what is important and possible for ITE lecturers (la Velle, Newman, Montgomery & Hyatt, 2020). In addition, more recent
developments, such as the introduction and expansion of online PGCEs in England and the increasing use of a blended
delivery modality make this an important current area of research. Phenomenographic methodology emerged from
research into teaching and learning in Scandinavia in the late 1970s (Ashworth & Lucas, 1998) and is the study of the
qualitatively different ways in which a phenomenon can be experienced and conceptualised (Marton, 1994). The aim of
phenomenographic research is to describe and classify previously unspecified ways of conceiving reality (Svensson, 1997)
and it has been widely used as a research tool in Higher Education (Entwhistle, 1997). In this paper, the argument for using
a phenomenographic conceptual framework in the context of online ITE teaching is outlined along with findings from a
review of relevant literature and the plans for data collection and analysis.
This research has full ethical approval from the Ethics Board at the University of Worcester.