Abstract

This thesis in Educational Theory explores how teachers in Denmark reconfigured their practices of teaching to be conducted via digital means during the COVID-19 pandemic. In a time where people were locked away in isolation from the world they knew due to the threat of a of the deadly virus, I show the reconfiguration of teaching practices that subsequently impacted educational relations situated in, out and alongside the classroom. Accordingly, I draw from interviews I conducted with teachers, reflecting on their lived experiences during this period, that gives insight into how they responded to the sudden and forced shift of the classroom. Drawing on Paulo Freire’s concepts of ‘banking education’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘alienation’ with Nel Noddings’ notion of ‘care’, I argue for an approach oriented towards care and attention to the ways in which teachers are both limited in their efforts of caring but also find new ways of doing so within the changed, digital classroom. The teachers reconfiguring interventions certainly give hope for the future in which digitalization is expected to increasingly transform classrooms but nonetheless also show a limit to how much hardship the teaching professional ideal of care can endure in educational relations.