When Early Childhood Teacher Education Becomes a Hologram: Innovating Motives and Uninnovating Dilemmas

On March 12, 2020, all university campuses in Norway shut down due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Norwegian government then provided institutions of higher education with policy guidelines informing them that they were expected to develop alternative, digitalised forms of teaching to enable their students to continue and complete their studies without delay. This demand reduced the university to a hologram amid the expectation of an uninterrupted continuation of its educational programmes. This situation forced individual teachers to employ innovative thinking and led to institutional (re-)searches for new activity settings that could be established in the digitalised university. These individual and institutional (re-)searches anchored on the motive of continuation are the focus of this chapter. Even though digitalisation was reported by the Norwegian government as successful, we see it as tantamount to a reduction of learning and as ‘dissituated’ learning and thus argue for careful innovations extending the activity settings of professional socialisation.