On the Cusp of Profound Change: Science Teacher Education in and Beyond the Pandemic

Abstract

In May 2020, we used the editorial Science Teacher Education in the Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic (Verma et al., 2020) as an occasion to document the unique time in history in which we found ourselves. In our editorial, we focused on "1) documenting snapshots of the global impact of the pandemic on life and schools, 2) examining a sampling of governmental leaders' responses to the pandemic, especially considering what we can learn about societies relation to, and reliance (or not) on, science; and 3) documenting the ways in which the COVID-19 had helped amplify our societal and educational inequities" (p. 483). At the time we wrote our editorial there had been more than 4 million global cases of COVID-19 and more than 250,000 global COVID-19 related deaths. On November 21, 2020, the date on which we wrote this editorial, and approximately six months after our first COVID-19 focused editorial, there were more than 55 million global COVID-19 cases and more than 1.3 million global deaths attributed to the pandemic. As can be seen, we continue to suffer tremendously at the hands of the pandemic. Now, while it may be tempting to provide another snapshot as we did in May to document the impact of the pandemic on life and schools, our governmental responses, and the ways in which COVID-19 continues to amplify societal and educational inequities, we have instead chosen to focus this editorial on how science teacher education has been challenged as a result of the ongoing grip of the pandemic, and as a result of those challenges, the opportunities that we are now presented with. More specifically, we document some of the changes to science teacher education that have occurred and point to how innovative approaches used to make these changes possible might also point to the future. Further, we propose and consider how the new lines of inquiry connected to the new insights made apparent during the COVID-19 pandemic might support the field of science teacher education in imagining a more equitable future that is grounded in cultivating science student's and citizen's critical consciousness and reliance on science and justice-informed decision making. Changes to science teacher education in the pandemicThe first wave of the pandemic, which rolled across the world from January, brought with it abrupt transitions to remote learning with varied success through a range of online platforms (Durden, 2020;Lederman, 2020). In response, science teacher educators across the globe were faced with making decisions about how to best support preservice teachers learning to teach in ways that are very different from the traditional in-person instruction and field-based CONTACT Todd Campbell

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