Teachers and teacher education are often presented as "problems" to be solved, with policy solutions that focus on ways to make teachers "better" and improve teacher "quality" by introducing prescriptive strategies. We investigate the ways COVID-19-related changes to university and school-based facets of Initial…

COVID-19 has had a profound influence on the conduct of teaching and learning in higher education. Almost everywhere a sudden shift occurred as educators transitioned courses from mainly face-to-face teaching and learning to emergency remote instruction, mostly conducted online. While details varied for individual faculty members, institutions,…

The article presents the narratives of two academics with mobility impairments who work in the largest open distance learning higher education institution in South Africa. We share our experiences as we navigate through the COVID-19 pandemic and reflect on this phase. For many people, life will never be the same after this pandemic; people have…

This paper considers the COVID-19 pandemic as a test that has disrupted the flow of a particular type of social and physical mobility. It takes pathways embarked upon by students from Asian countries to "prestigious" anglophone universities as its focal point of analysis, considering how the residential, consecratory experience of…

Across the globe, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken an extraordinary toll on racially minoritised and economically disadvantaged communities. The United States has been no exception. In the U.S., serious illness and death are two- to three-times more common among Black, Latinx, and Native American populations than among white people. In the summer…

During the home confinement caused by COVID-19, universities closed and all teaching became virtual, testing the sustainability of the education system. A total of 3080 Spanish university students participated in a survey to analyse how they have adapted to this situation, whether there has been a digital divide and how they have followed training…

Based on related academic and semi-academic discourse, this paper aims to investigate the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on important actors and their expectations in the higher education (HE) sector. As open organisations, higher education institutions (HEIs) are influenced and shaped by different stakeholders' numerous and often controversial…

Teacher education programmes are embedded in both higher and K-12 education contexts. This study explores how collective teacher agency is developed and manifested within two online teacher education courses in a Canadian university and a Chinese university, respectively, under the Covid-19 pandemic context. Employing a digital ethnographic…

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused a global crisis in higher education, affecting all aspects of university work and practices. This article focuses on student experiences, in particular by problematising academic and wellbeing support available to non-traditional students. This article proposes an original approach to student support as comprising…

While widening participation in higher education for regional, rural and remote (RRR) Australian communities has been a major policy focus in recent years, the pandemic and resulting lockdowns and closures of internal borders between Australian states and territories has impacted significantly upon RRR students who relocate to pursue tertiary…

While the impacts of COVID-19 on higher education are still unfolding, it is clear that the disruption caused by the pandemic has provided a warrant to re-consider existing teaching and learning practices. We provide a reading on whether existing teaching and learning practices should be retained or whether new practices can and should emerge…

This paper focuses on the epistemic inequality of international students as a "new" inequality that is under-represented in the current debates about decolonisation (albeit shaped by colonial discourses depicting international students as in deficit and incapable of meeting the standards of (colonial) universities). In this theoretical…

The impact of the current COVID-19 pandemic on universities has been seismic. The requirement to pivot suddenly to remote working has required the development of contingency curriculums, socially distanced campuses and an increased demand for online learning. This paper sets out to capture the emergent working practices and experiences of a group…

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak in Spring 2020, universities around the world have quickly adopted online teaching as an emergency measure. Informed by activity theory, the present qualitative case study aims to better understand the nature of the rapid institutional transition and its impact on academics' pedagogical experiences…

In response to the rapidly deteriorating pandemic situation, a national lockdown was imposed in March 2020 which had profound effects for students across the UK higher education sector. Given their precarious and isolated position in UK higher education, understanding how the pandemic has affected postgraduate research (PGR) students, relating to…