This paper explores the reflections of two academic developers' experiences as they supported university academic staff with the transition to remote teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify the three T-zones: the zone of trauma, transition and transformation experienced by academic staff during the time of the COVID-19 crises. These zones lead to academics going through phases of learning, unlearning and relearning, as they adapted to emergency remote teaching. Although higher education has experienced much disruption over the past few years, the arrival of COVID-19 has created unprecedented panic in the sector. The methodological framework for this paper is reflective practice. As academic developers, we reflect on our engagement with academic teaching staff and their experiences of the learning processes through displacement and isolation. As we engaged with academic staff within our portfolio as academic developers, we soon saw a pattern emerging in the way academics began to engage with the new normal. The challenges of rapidly changing their behaviour, skills, knowledge and ways of doing in the face-to-face delivery of lectures, and engagement with students over many years, created a barrier in their initial response to moving to emergency remote teaching. The zones highlight the learning, unlearning and relearning processes and adaptation experiences of the academics as they try to move teaching and learning online. We argue that during a time of crises lies opportunities to innovate and create new ways of being and doing. Academics adaptation during a time of crisis brought into focus the need to address inequalities with regard to access of resources and learning environment. In the South African context, this pandemic highlighted the remnants of an unequal past, as the struggle to ensure access takes centre stage once again. The pandemic also heightened academics' need to teach with care and compassion, which strangely created a sense of connectedness that was not observable during face-to-face teaching.

In this Editorial, we take the opportunity to expand on the second Journal of University Teaching and Learning theme, Developing Teaching Practice. Building on Editorial 18(4), which articulated changes to higher education in the period roughly between 1980 and 2021, we believe it is pertinent to explore the changing conceptions of academic as ‘teacher’. We use Engeström’s cultural-historical activity theory as a lens to consider how higher education teachers are situated in the current context of rapid changes arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. We explore possible future purposes of higher education to consider flow-on impacts on the purpose of its teachers and how their roles might change to accommodate future expectations. We assert the need to challenge the notion of the academic as a person who is recruited into higher education largely because of their subject matter expertise and maintains strong commitment to teaching expertise that is grounded in scholarship, critical self...

It appears that teachers and teacher educators have fossilized in their resolve to continue doing what they’ve always done, despite calls for fundamental change. So, what does "a changed world" actually mean for teachers and teacher educators? How might society prepare teachers for this changed world and what are the new capabilities that such a program should focus on? What does fundamental change in teaching and teacher education actually look like? This book is about teacher education reform and seeks to answer these and other questions. More specifically the book aims to showcase a disruptive model in teacher education and answer some of the ponderings around what teacher education could be and how it could be organized differently for the different world in which teachers now have to operate. The book showcases an innovative Australian teacher education program and reviews the research findings of such a program in terms of graduate teacher outcomes. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> From one of Australia’s leading teacher educators comes a book about teacher education reform. David Lynch is professor of education at Southern Cross University (Australia) and the author of numerous books and articles on teacher education reform. This latest book caps 25 years working in and studying teaching, education and teacher education.

Teaching practice is one of the most significant components of a teacher education program that prepares prospective teachers for a fast-changing and technology-infused world. However, in many developing countries like Pakistan, it has remained stuck in the traditional methods (face-to-face, without proper utilization of technology) which made it vulnerable during COVID-19. This study explores teaching practice methods and strategies used by Pakistani universities before and during COVID-19. It further identifies the causes behind its deficiencies to prepare prospective teachers for the challenges of the current era. Using semi-structured interviews, data was gathered from nine teaching practice supervisors from nine different universities. The study found that before COVID-19, eight universities used traditional methods and strategies for teaching practice. During COVID-19, the universities used four different approaches (online teaching practice in mock classes, online teaching practice with real students, microteaching 2.0, and teaching practice through emails and WhatsApp groups) for its continuation. Ignoring modern tools and technologies, lack of focus and attention, and a clerical approach were reported to be the main reasons behind its deficiencies to prepare prospective teachers for the challenges of the current world. The study highlights the importance of using blended modes for teaching practice, allocating some credit hours/modules for purely online teaching practice, giving more importance to it, and providing specialized training to teaching practice supervisors and cooperating teachers so that they can supervise and assess prospective teachers more effectively.

This discursive essay considers the role of the higher education teacher (lecturer/Professor/ Academic) within a changing and disruptive landscape and offers a vision that negotiates this change and maintains the teacher as central to the university or institute of higher education.