Changes, Longings, and Potentials for Future Pedagogical Practices: Investigating University Teachers’ Experiences During the Spring 2020 Lockdown

This paper takes a quantitative ethnographic approach to understand how the lockdown in the spring of 2020 affected the teachers’ work situation at a large university in Denmark. Based on free-text responses from survey data, we create epistemic networks to explore how teachers articulate changes, longings, and potentials for their own future digital teaching practices based on their experiences of the first lockdown. The findings illustrate that interaction and human contact, which play a pivotal role in teachers’ didactical skillsets and efforts to create good learning environments, were missing during the lockdown. The study also highlights that teachers’ perceptions of the inability of digital, technological solutions appear to relate to on-campus teaching ideals. As such, this paper argues that future crisis-handling, as well as developments and refinements of digital teaching formats, at the university, should be attentive to support and foster better areas of contact and interaction between students and teachers.