Remote teaching is a teaching practice that has become increasingly common in the Nordic countries. This is as a result of urbanization and difficulties in obtaining qualified teachers, but also as a result of digitalisation and new digital possibilities. In both Norway and Finland, remote teaching has occurred since 1990 to a relatively extensive extent, while in Sweden, the teaching practice was not regulated in the Education Act until 2015. The Swedish Educational Act stipulates that remote teaching is an interactive and synchronous form of teaching that is conducted with ICT in which teachers and students are separated in space but not in time, and that an on-site facilitator must be present in the classroom to provide support and take responsibility for the students during the lesson.
The aim of this proposed study is to gain more knowledge about how remote teachers in Sweden reason about their own teaching practice with regard of the spatial separation to the students. The pedagogical decisions they have to make are partly of a different kind than in classroom teaching due to the use of ICT and concerns how to close the gap of distance and how to create a presence of closeness.
To understand and analyse remote teaching I will use the pedagogical pyramid developed by Skog (2021), and the Theory of transactional distance (TTD) by (Moore, 1993). The pedagogical pyramid is developed to theoretically understand remote teaching as a synchronous practice with ICT and an onsite facilitator and TTD is developed to explore the effect of transactional distance in all sorts of distance education.
The method of the study is qualitative. First, a pilot study will be done based on participatory observations of teachers' collegial collaboration. Through the opportunity to participate in weekly planning meetings, I can take part in their discussions concerning issues related to their teaching practice. Later, semi-structured interviews will be conducted in order to systematically gain the teachers' notions of the impact of transactional distance on remote teaching and how to handle it.
Expected result of the study is to gain more knowledge about how remote teachers:
- reason about the characteristics of the remote teaching practice and pedagogical issues
- reason about the spatial separation to the students and the facilitator
- reason about how the transactional distance effects the teaching practice and how they can handle it
Remote teaching is conducted in a similar way in the Nordic countries and this study can contribute with specific knowledge concerning how to "mind the gap" between the participants due to the aspect of distance, besides general pedagogical insights.
Reykjavik: University of Iceland , 2022. s. 687-688