From the mid-1990s, education policy in Ireland has sought to realise the potential of ICT in education / digital learning (Conway & Brennan-Freeman, 2015), as evidenced through a number of strategy documents and ICT policies published from this time onwards. This includes, for instance, The ICT framework for schools (NCCA, 2007) and the Digital Strategy for Schools 2015-2020 (Department of Education and Skills, 2015). In tandem, Irish ITE (Initial Teacher Education) policy has, for over a decade, recognised the significance of embedding digital skills in preservice teacher education, and has continued to develop in this regard (The Teaching Council, 2011, 2017).

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, education institutions in Ireland ceased in-person teaching and made an abrupt transition to online delivery. This shift represented an unprecedented challenge, with teachers quickly pivoting to online platforms and tools to deliver content and stay connected with their students. The closure of schools highlighted that preparing future teachers for fully remote teaching had heretofore not been recognised at either policy or practice levels in Irish ITE (Power et al., 2022). The need therefore arose for a rapid response to equip student-teachers with the requisite technological, pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK) to facilitate teaching and learning in fully online and hybrid scenarios at school levels.

A flurry of global research during this time captured educator and student experiences of emergency remote teaching and learning (Hodges et al., 2020), with some studies detailing interventions that helped teachers and students cope with the new realities. There is, however, less discussion around what happened in Ireland, specifically from the perspective of teacher education and its various stakeholders. Mindful of this, the current paper adopts a multi-pronged approach to address this deficit.

We begin with the policy landscapes of digital learning and teacher education to date, critiquing developments regarding the place and use of digital technologies in Irish schools; this serves as a contextual backdrop against which to situate the pandemic responses of 2020 and 2021. This is followed by a desk-based literature review which captures several initiatives (such as Donlon et al., 2022; Tiernan et al., 2021) which were designed and delivered by Irish ITE providers; it reports on the challenges and successes of the period, and the lessons learned by teacher educators, student-teachers, and teacher education institutions. Drawing on these learnings, the paper turns to the future and considers the place (if any) for such programmatic developments, which were designed as emergency responses during a global crisis. At that time, schools in Ireland were required “to put in place arrangements to facilitate […] Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning”, and to ‘”develop the skills set of the teachers and support staff” for this (Department of Education and Skills, 2020b, p. 4). This includes, for instance: 1) Questions around the potential transferability of skills (interpersonal as well as digital) developed within these initiatives between fully online, hybrid, and traditional face-to-face teaching scenarios; 2) Considerations around the most relevant theories of learning that pertain to online/remote teaching and learning at primary and post-primary (K12) levels; 3) The optimum design for such ITE initiatives; 4) The learnings from research emerging from Irish schools regarding school closures and emergency remote teaching; 5) The potential contributions that student-teachers and Newly Qualified Teachers (NQTs) who have been equipped with this skillset for remote teaching and learning might make to their schools; 6) The potential continuity of remote/online teaching beyond the Covid19 crisis for challenges such as forced school closures due to adverse weather events and as possible (partial) solution to teacher supply issues (Department of Education and Skills, 2020a).

This paper utilises desk-based research in two phases. The first phase consists of a review of relevant policy documents and reports regarding digital learning and teacher education to date, with specific focus on the place and use of digital technologies in both teacher education and within Irish schools leading up to and during the pandemic. Such documents were drawn primarily from two sources. The first of these includes policy from the Teaching Council of Ireland, such as the 2020 ‘Ceim: Standards for Initial Teacher Education’ document and the 2021 ‘School Placement Innovation Report’. The second main source is that of the Department of Education and Skills and includes such documents as ‘Guidance on Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning in a COVID-19 Context’ (2020) and the recent ‘Digital Strategy for Schools to 2027’ (2022) policy document. The second phase consists of a scoping review of journal articles which pertained to the development and use of online teaching pedagogies in programmes of Initial Teacher Education in the Republic of Ireland during the pandemic. It draws primarily on the well-established and widely-employed five-stage framework for scoping reviews put forward by Arksey and O’Malley (2005): (1) identifying the research question, (2) identifying relevant studies, (3) study selection, (4) charting the data, and (5) collating, summarising and reporting the results. The authors propose a number of reasons for undertaking a scoping review that were deemed relevant for the current study, including to examine the extent, range and nature of research activity,to summarise and disseminate research findings, and to identify potential research gaps in the existing literature. The searches were performed using a timeframe from March 2020 to December 2022 in order to reflect the ongoing pandemic timeframe, and sought results from academic journals that were written in English. The databases used were Academic Search Complete, British Educational Index, Education Full Text, Education Research Complete, and ERIC, all via the EBSCOhost interface.

At a time where the Teaching Council of Ireland has proposed that “Initial Teacher Education appears ripe for substantial reimagining” as a result of “the innovative practice that has emerged” (2021, p. 26) during this period, and situated within an evolving policy context for both teacher education (The Teaching Council, 2020) and digital learning at school levels (Department of Education and Skills, 2022), this paper provides a timely opportunity to reflect on what was learned, and understand what may be useful for the future in the post-pandemic world that awaits us. Our paper will draw together the data from Irish publications in order to understand the skills that were gained during Covid-19 and discuss the potential transferability of these to the current and future directions of teaching and learning. We consider the implications for initial teacher education - specifically focusing on the integration of online and digital learning methodologies while commenting on the theories of online learning which might be employed in this regard. In the changing education landscape, we examine the potential of online and digital learning to be employed in non-emergency times, not only as a set of strategies to manage school challenges such as student absence and adverse weather conditions but as a set of skills and competencies that will allow teachers to create engaging and innovative spaces for the learners.

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