What We’re Taking Through the Portal: How Our Experiences of Remote Teaching as Parent-Educators During COVID-19 Impacted Our Practice

This chapter investigates the perspectives and learning that we as parent-educators developed during the COVID-19 pandemic and how this impacted our pedagogies. In 2020 and 2021 our teaching shifted from face-to-face to online delivery while we facilitated our children’s remote schooling. The disruption caused by the pandemic was a portal-like opportunity to rethink our approaches to learning and teaching. Our collaborative reflections on our changing ideas about learning and pedagogies form the basis of this chapter. We adapted conceptual frameworks including narrative inquiry and the Indigenous notion of yarning to develop a collaborative narrative inquiry approach. To examine the complexities of interconnected individual, social and cultural elements, we draw on a theoretical framework that combines Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model and Antonovsky’s Salutogenic approach. The chief findings of the research showed that a focus on inclusive pedagogies including student voice and agency, was not just desirable for learners but was imperative to ensure learner engagement.