Each year, the EIS Action Research Grants scheme enables a cohort of our members to undertake projects which advance their professional learning and innovate teaching practice. In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, EIS researchers are additionally engaged with the challenges of lockdowns and disruption for both their teaching and their research.

Responding to these challenges, action researchers reflect on the impact COVID-19 for their projects, their learners, and colleagues. Here, four EIS researchers share some of their reflections and early findings related to the pandemic, and the way forward for teacher research during the pandemic.

Jennifer Milne, Secondary English teacher in Fife.

What was planned as a classroom based research project that could be continued during blended learning was, in practicality, not sustainable when we returned to online learning at the start of January. The project was based in narrative theory and methods, and in the new disruption I was able to continue to use this method to investigate learners’ experiences in the current crisis.

I had been worried as an English teacher about all the young people I taught who were no longer reading in class. Reading improves learning and resiliency outcomes. They were missing out again, even though they were now in school.

Covid-19 protocols and risk assessments meant using class novels was restricted for a period of time.

Many children only read in class, don’t have access to books at home and libraries were closed for most of the past year.

My fears have been confirmed by my new research project: a portion of young people have been reading less for nearly a year. Bittersweet then are the findings that another sizeable portion is now reading more. We must respond to both findings.

The major challenge to representing these experiences through my project is the restriction on working with young people 1:1 online. Narrative methods offer depth and insight, and work best in person but are still possible online. More difficult is adapting these to group settings. For a researcher in a pandemic, adaption is the only way to progress.

John Swinney has said “education is the antidote to poverty”, and reading is a huge part of education. Giving young people access to different stories in their journey of learning offers them new hope. I feel stronger than ever that narrative method makes my research vital in allowing young people to voice their experiences of reading and learning in the current Covid-19 pandemic. We need to hear their stories.

Investment made in online learning must be balanced by some real books, and a focus on stories. Pupil engagement is still a real challenge in online learning, despite everyone’s best efforts. Maybe books are the antidote to remote learning?

Louise Shambrook and Don Mackeen, City of Glasgow College

Don and Louise work as Lecturers on the Transitions Course at City of Glasgow College. It is a specialist course for young people with a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome, with the course’s aim being to provide a step from school to further education. Developing social skills, confidence and re-engaging with education are the main objectives for the majority of the students.

Both Louise and Don recently completed research projects with the Transition course students as part of their Master Degrees. The opportunity arose with an EIS Action Research Grant to continue their research into this under-researched area. This grant was awarded in September 2020. The Transition Course students started their academic year in October online, spent 6 weeks in the college building and have had online teaching from November to present.

This off/on/off face to face contact with the students has provided several challenges and differences for Don and Louise to conduct their research:

• Less day-to-day contact with students – decreased knowledge about students and in turn, less trust
• Less number of students interested in taking part
• Problem of getting questionnaires and consent forms returned (emailing)
• Limited to individual interviews with students (more inhibitions in group meetings, students don’t know one another, so talk less in front of each other)
• Most students do not turn on video in Zoom interviews, so, can only listen to voice and not able to observe body language/mannerisms.

Here is a summary of student responses to one question from questionnaire.

It has been recognised that ASN students are struggling during the pandemic due to remote teaching and learning, and this is an area of research that needs more attention.

Stephen Scholes, North Ayrshire

Documents can be easily overlooked as the viable and vital sources of data that they are for enquiring-practitioners. Documents, whether online or offline, contain details of processes and interactions, and are themselves the physical evidence of the various motivations and practices that led to their creation. School handbooks could, for example, contain information about curricular provision, whilst at the same time they are artefacts of practices linked to parental engagement and school publicity. Documents are, as McCulloch puts it, ‘produced independently of the researcher’ and therefore they open exciting avenues, as well as dead ends, for enquiry as they are likely to contain unexpected information about a range of topics.

Regardless of the various limitations that money, time, and pandemic related restrictions place on practitioner-research, documents are readily available. Vast amounts of online documents await further investigation, including school inspection reports; school handbooks; websites and newsletters; local and national government reports and policy documents; and returns to consultations, such as those by the Education and Skills Committee of the Scottish Parliament. In a pandemic where our schedules change faster than the weather, such online material ensures that we have readily accessible data at our fingertips.