A pandemic as the mother of invention? Collegial online collaboration to cope with the COVID-19 pandemic

This article discusses a study that took place in a giant staffroom filled with almost 7,000 teachers – namely a Facebook group for Swedish music teachers. It aims to present how music teachers in Sweden used this group in the first two months of the COVID-19 pandemic (March and April of 2020) to cope with challenges related to teaching music. The study is based on Gert Biesta’s perspective on the teacher profession. With the consent of the participants, we have analysed the 303 posts (and their comments) that directly addressed the COVID-19 situation during that period. We found that the group works as an important collegial forum and that the teachers pragmatically use the group to solve educational problems; further, the posts concerning work-conditions get the most engagement. The most frequent types of posts concerned how to design teaching situations under the new conditions. Specifically, asking questions, sharing material, asking for material and letting off steam were the most common types. Music teachers seem to be loyal, collegial and intent on solving any challenge to facilitate students’ learning as regulated in the syllabus. We hope this article can motivate other researchers to perform similar studies or build on our results. We conclude by speculating about what the new normal will be for music teachers when the pandemic is over.