Students’ Journeys to the Magical Land of Teaching

This paper explores a small group of female student teachers’ experiences of learning through a pandemic. Students from the University of Dundee, Scotland and University Roma Tres, Italy participated in the award winning eTwinning international Hands of the World (HOTW) project which connects schools and universities across the world to undertake a wide range of educational collaborative work to develop their knowledge and understanding of intercultural education. One of the project activities required student teachers to share their learning experiences of learning to become a teacher in a pandemic, through a multimodal narrative that involved text, images and music. This study, therefore, examined student teachers’ narratives with a focus on how different aspects of the pandemic affected their studies alongside their mental well-being and what strategies students utilised to enable them to be successful. An explanatory design analysed students’ reflective narratives, which were publicly available on the project’s Padlet™ page. Data were analysed thematically where the themes, Transitions, Mental Wellbeing and Coping Strategies were explored through the messages conveyed through the text, images and music. Our analysis enabled us to identify that at different stages of the pandemic, students experienced similar feelings and anxieties, where a range of strategies were used that demonstrated resilience and determination to succeed. This paper provides a small insight into the impact a pandemic has on student teachers’ learning and well-being through a narrative storyline.