Emerging Realities from COVID-19 and the Fourth Industrial Revolution: Mathematics Education Lecturers’ Collaborative Autoethnographic Experiences

With the emergence of Covid-19 in South Africa in March 2020 and the subsequent lockdown restrictions, traditional universities looked to the University of South Africa for best practices regarding online teaching and learning. The Covid-19 lockdowns resulted in thousands of pre-service teachers in South African universities and colleges shifting and having to adapt at short notice to online learning. The outbreak caused students and lecturers to be thrust into online learning and teaching situations, with most of them having no prior training or preparation for the shift. For lecturers, the shift to online teaching represented monumental pedagogical and technical challenges, as they were expected to adopt and adapt to an online modality while rapidly learning to use various tools and maintaining the academic integrity of their institutions and modules. This chapter presents the autoethnographic experiences of four University of South Africa lecturers relating to teaching and administering learning and assessments for mathematics education modules. Within the qualitative research approach, we use a collaborative autoethnographic reflexivity approach to demonstrate the intersections between university society and self; the particular and the general; the personal and the politics of knowledge in the context of 4IR and the Covid-19 pandemic. Our experiences of online teaching and learning made us realise that the training of successful and effective mathematics teachers in online spaces during the pandemic is a complex and dynamic task, marked by issues of social justice, quality, equity, and academic inclusion, especially in a country as unequal as South Africa.