Although much has been written on emergency remote teaching occasioned by the circulation of the COVID-19 virus around the world, existing studies tend to hold a somewhat single-dimensional perspective by paying attention solemnly in the initial stages of the pandemic or the post-pandemic period when education started to “normalize”. Moreover, directing more attention towards the unprecedented factor of the situation, existing studies seem to overlook the extent to which students were prepared for education during unexpected pandemics, wars, natural disasters, such as earthquakes, or navigating ethical concerns raised by generative AI, creating blind spots where higher education institutions are not critically evaluated. Departing from this premise, our paper puts a spotlight on the problematic nature of the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for higher education as a vantage point. 

To gain an in-depth understanding of how COVID-19 affected instruction so far and what it brought with it, we believe there is a need to consider both periods (switching to ERT and reverting to face-to-face) simultaneously. Considering the current wars and the possible outbreak of a similar pandemic where education has and might be disrupted again, it becomes much more important to conduct research in this area utilizing metaphorical images that students use to conceptualize themselves during online teaching and face to face teaching. Metaphors are useful in gaining a nuanced understanding of students’ experiences as they offer insight into the process participants go through by providing a conceptual framework through which we can perceive and interpret their experiences in relation to other familiar concepts or ideas (Saban, 2010). Moreover, metaphors can be used for reflection (e.g. Lynch & Fisher-Ari, 2017) as they are a powerful means to reify previous experiences (Zhao, Coombs & Zhou, 2010) or to explore participants' cognition, including identities (e.g. Thomas & Beauchamp, 2011) beliefs (Ulusoy, 2022), as well as experiences (e.g. Craig, 2018) because they not only add a new perspective, generate a discussion of a certain topic (Saban, 2010), also “tease out connections which might not be made use of by direct questions” (Leavy, McSorley, & Bote, 2007, p. 1220).

In this study, we captured undergraduate students’ metaphorical conceptualizations of themselves during COVID-19 not only during online teaching but also in times of face-to-face teaching periods while the pandemic was ongoing. By exerting attention towards understanding university students' cognitive constructs through the use of metaphors, it is hoped that the study will help university students situate their learning context, in this case, ERT, and switch back face-to-face into their own reality. In this sense, it will also guide educators and teacher trainers in designing programs to support university students' learning process and help them be ready for similar scenarios. The findings from this study will also build upon the growing literature on ERT within an international higher education English Medium University (EMI) context and thus shed light on perceptions and needs of undergraduate students particularly during uncertain times and new steps to be taken in designing effective educational programs.With this in the background, the following research questions were developed according to Saban’s (2010) metaphor research question structure:

1. What metaphorical images do undergraduate students use to describe students during the COVID-19 (a) online teaching period and (b) face-to-face teaching period?

2. What are the conceptual themes derived from the metaphorical images regarding undergraduate students’ concept of students during the COVID-19 (a) online teaching period and (b) face-to-face teaching period?

3. Which factors affect undergraduate students’ conceptualizations of undergraduate students during the COVID-19 (a) online teaching period and (b) face-to-face teaching period?

4. What are the implications for online teaching and face-to-face teaching periods during uncertain times?

We collected the data using two metaphor-generation method prompts. We developed the prompts in English using Saban, Kocbeker, and Saban’s (2007) metaphor-generation method. We then revised and modified the writing prompts based on expert opinion from three faculty members. Our prompts were: An undergraduate student during the COVID-19 online teaching period is like…because… An undergraduate student during the COVID-19 face-to-face teaching period is like...because… We conducted our study on the North Cyprus campus of an internationally recognized English-medium university located in Turkey. We sent an invitation email to all undergraduate students in the university. The email included information about our study and a link to the Google form we developed to collect the data. The form included three parts: (a) an informed consent form approved by the University’s Ethics committee, (b) demographic questions (i.e., gender, age, major, class level, and nationality, as well as accommodation status while attending online classes during ERT) and (c) the metaphor prompts. Undergraduate students who agreed to participate in the study responded to the questions anonymously. The data collection lasted around three weeks. We ended up with 114 well-formed metaphors from undergraduate students from different year groups (76 male 37 female and 1 non-binary) enrolled in different programs, including Economics and Administrative Sciences, Education and Humanities, and Engineering programs. 87 participants were Turkish and Turkish Cypriots and 27 were international students. International students were from Azerbaijan (n=3), Kenya (n=4), Bangladesh (n=1), Egypt (n=2), India (n=1), Kazakhstan (n=2), Nigeria (n=4), Pakistan (n=5), RW (n=1), United Arab Emirates (n=1), Saudi Arabia (n=1), and Syria (n=1). One participant did not prefer to share citizenship information. Participants’ ages ranged between 17 and 28 years. Data was exposed to inductive content analysis. We coded the participants' metaphorical images in their responses for each metaphor prompt (e.g., fish in an aquarium, prisoner). We eliminated the student responses that included a metaphorical image without metaphorical reasoning as recommended by Saban (2010), and that did not include a metaphor but general views about students or education during the pandemic (e.g., An undergraduate student during the Covid-19 online teaching period is depressed and hopeless because it was awful not to know when we will go to the campus). We double-coded the data to categorize the codes under the themes and eliminate overlapping and redundant codes (Creswell, 2011).

The results revealed three major themes regarding students’ conceptualizations of themselves during the COVID-19 online teaching period: (a) students as absolute complaints (among some representative metaphorical images were a prisoner, being trapped in an untidy room, fish in an aquarium, wings of a hummingbird trapped in a slow dream); (b) students as controllers of their own learning (among some representative metaphorical images were someone in heaven, a time controller, and an artist in an album zone); and (c) students as overwhelmed beings (among some representative metaphorical images were torture, fish out of the pond, punching a wall, and fitting everything in a room). The results revealed three major themes regarding students’ conceptualizations of students during the COVID-19 face-to-face teaching period: (a) Students enjoying a long-awaited reunion (among some representative metaphorical images were having undergone a beautiful struggle, watching a slow-moving river, drinking cold water in a hot summer); (b) students experiencing discomfort (among some representative metaphorical images were a beast in a struggle, nightmare, a teenager navigating high school, and torture); and (c) students with mixed experiences (among some representative metaphorical images were astronaut returning to earth from space, and being a stranger). Our results showed that students’ major, class level, and where they lived while attending online classes may have influenced their metaphorical images during COVID-19 online and face-to-face instruction. Although conducted with a small sample size, this study has important implications for fostering student resilience and sustainability of education during uncertain times. Our results suggest that undergraduate students need their voices to be heard. In occasions such as emergencies where new policies need to be implemented, it is necessary to include undergraduate students in the decision-making process. Educators need to revisit their teaching practices and adapt them according to students’ current needs particularly during emergent times.

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