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 Tre, 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 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 the strategies students utilised to enable them to be successful. An explanatory design analysed students’ reflective narratives, which were publicly available on the projoect’s Padlet™ page. Data were analysed thematically with the themes, Transitions, Mental Wellbeing and Coping Strategies explored through the messages conveyed in the text, images and music. Our analysis enabled us to identify that at different stages of the pandemic, students experienced similar feelings and anxieties, and that a range of strategies were used that demonstrated resilience and determination to succeed. This paper proovides a small insight into the impact a pandemic has on student-teachers’ learning and well-being through a narrative storyline.