Stories found within higher education: Shifting professional identities of academics

After three years of the impact of COVID-19 on teaching and learning, it is evident that future sudden shifts to online instruction are a certainty. For academic teachers in the future to learn from our experiences, we need to reflect on the practicalities and emotions experienced during this time. This chapter explores how academic teachers often view themselves as proficient in either face-to-face or online delivery as a component of their professional identities. Knowing that an academic teacher’s epistemic beliefs and values are intertwined with relationships to pedagogies, people, places, and practices, this storied chapter opens what we found in an international study ‘Teaching & Learning in COVID-19 Times’, which captured what teachers were experiencing as their personal lives, professional responsibilities, and teacher identities altered and intertwined when directed to work and teach from home. We explore this further based on the collection of stories from cross-sectoral international teachers during the first months of global restrictions in 2020. The data hold stories of academic teachers with significant teaching expertise, with 85% of participants having over ten years of teaching experience. The co-authors were privileged through this research to be the recipients of stories about the public and private lives of teachers and will use re-storying as a method to ensure ethics of care in sharing their identity stories as we speculate on how teachers might view themselves now. Our re-storying will allow for a deep dive into the teachers’ pandemic responses and the implications of being a teacher post-COVID-19.