**Preface to "Online and Distance Learning during Lockdown Times: COVID-19 Stories"**

It would be an understatement to say that the COVID-19 pandemic turned our lives upside down. Some refer to it as a once-in-a-century pandemic (comparing it with the 1918 influenza pandemic). The world began to take notice of the severity of the COVID-19 from about early March 2020 when The World Health Organisation declared that COVID-19 had become a pandemic. To control the spread of the disease, governments introduced severe measures restricting movement, closing buildings and preventing access to public spaces. Physical building in schools, colleges, and universities were closed allowing only for, in some contexts, limited access to children with special education needs and those whose parents were key workers. Teachers and school leaders had several days, if not hours, to prepare to move their teaching online.

These unprecedented events provided a useful context for researchers and practitioners to examine how teachers, students and parents responded to a world-wide public health emergency and overcame barriers to education. The Special Issue published in the journal Education Sciences under the title "Online and Distance Learning during Lockdown Times: COVID-19 Stories" brought together empirical evidence from a diverse range of countries across the world on the use of online, remote, and blended teaching and learning methods in all levels of educational contexts during these unprecedented times.

The present volume is a collection of papers from the Special Issue covering **K-12 educational contexts** representing the international experience of teaching and learning from the start of the first wave of lockdown. Our authors explored both the positive and negative experiences and consequences of remote teaching and learning methods for teachers, educational leaders, parents, and students. These paper also offer an insight into how policymakers and teachers developed innovative ways to help children continue to engage in their learning during the pandemic.

The first paper in this volume is by Ute Kaden whose descriptive explanatory single case study explores how school closures changed the life and work of a teacher in rural Alaska in the USA. This paper may be considered as one of the first studies on remote teaching because of school closures in early 2020. Based on the empirical evidence gathered using qualitative methods, Kaden reports on the impact of remote teaching on the teacher's workload and its potential for amplifying inequality and socio-economic divisions in society. She offers several recommendations for both practitioners and policy makers.

Rachel K. Schuck and Rachel Lambert's paper on teachers working with students with special education needs is particularly interesting given the multiple challenges of teaching and learning under lockdown conditions. They report the experience of two elementary special education teachers' transition to emergency remote teaching. With interview data gathered from a school with a largely Hispanic/Latin American student population, the study reveals the inequality in resources among students and challenges of meeting students' special education needs at home.

Next, Francesco Vincenzo Ferraro and colleagues report on the experience of students' remote online learning experience during the first wave of the pandemic. Based on survey research carried out in secondary schools in Naples, Italy, their study is particularly interesting given the fact that about 20% of these students did not have access to digital devices essential for remote learning. They revealed the levels of anxiety and stress the students felt during the unfamiliar forms of the learning period.

Issues that primary students face in learning mathematics at a distance is the focus of the paper

by James Russo and colleagues. Based on data collected using a mixed methods approach from 82 early years maths teachers in Australia, the authors report these issues from the perspective of teachers. They identified a range of challenges that students faced in engaging in productive struggles when learning maths remotely. Their research provides an insight into the conditions that promote students' learning of maths which is challenging to achieve in remote learning contexts.

Liina Lepp and colleagues' paper draws our attention to the tensions between factors influencing pedagogical decisions by teachers and how they are reflected in the teaching/delivery of online classes. Based on semi-structured interviews carried out with primary schools in Estonia, the authors identified a range of factors contributing to teachers' pedagogical decisions including the availability of and their familiarity with digital tools. Maintaining student interactions, motivation and own workload were some of the key factors that guided decisions in remote teaching during the pandemic.

The paper by Frances K Harper and colleagues focuses on parental involvement in teaching Mathematics at primary level during lockdown conditions. Based on secondary data from Twitter and responses to a survey from parents primarily in North America, New Zealand, and Australia, their paper offers an insight into an innovative approach to collecting and analyzing data appropriate for lockdown conditions. The authors provide insight into the resourcefulness of parents when helping their children's learning remotely. Implications for the maths education community are also provided.

The paper by Petra Polakov ´ a and Blanka Kl ´ ´ımova reports the results of their research project ´ investigating challenges associated with online teaching and learning from the perspective of students in the Czech Republic. Using a questionnaire as a data collection tool, they investigated secondary level tourism and gastronomy students' readiness for online learning. Their findings offer implications for future developments of education to integrate distance learning methods in predominantly face to face teaching contexts.

Iman Oraif and Tariq Elyas's paper investigates students' engagement in online leaning in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Their context was learning English as a foreign Language in secondary level schools in KSA. Based on data gathered from questionnaires from s 379 all-female student sample, the authors report the students' engagement from a number of motivational perspectives. Their recommendations are useful for the future integration of online methods for teaching and learning in schools.

Research reported in the next paper used messages in Facebook as data to gain insight into the multiple set of activities that a range of stakeholders in education engaged in during the pandemic to ensure education continued in their communities. Based on data from Estonia, the findings of Piret Luik and Marina Lepp provide insight into the roles, experiences and views of different stakeholders during the unprecedented situations that schools and communities found themselves in almost overnight.

Puspa Khanal and colleagues' contribution from Norway is based on a scoping review of the literature on how schools adapted to remote teaching. They looked at the organisational level issues in this adaptation process during one of the most challenging times in our living memory. Their paper offers an insight into how teachers explored strategies that allowed them to continue with teaching with minimum disruption to students' learning. The authors raise several questions about the continuation of some of the good practices beyond the pandemic. The paper offers a methodology for carrying out scoping reviews that other researchers might find useful as well.

In the next paper, Jonathan Brown and colleagues report their study carried out during the first lockdown in Scotland from March–June 2020. Using the concept of the Thirdspace and based on interviews with primary school teachers and head teachers, the authors explored how lockdown and digital technologies facilitated a Thirdspace for the continuation of education during the first lockdown. Their paper encourages us to think about how technologies could be used to extend the functions of schools.

The study of Dirk Lauret and Durdane Bayram-Jacobs explores the impact of online teaching and learning in secondary schools in the Netherlands. Based on data collected from interviews with teacher and students, and questionnaire data from students, their paper highlights both positive and negative aspects of online learning. They also report the supportive role of the school management in helping teachers and students navigate challenges in remote learning.

Liina Adov and Mario Maeots's contribution to this volume is based on their research on ¨ teachers' experience of using digital technologies for remote teaching in Estonia. Having conducted an interview-based study with science teachers, the authors identified different levels of willingness to use technology and explored the way teachers changed their technology practices during their online teaching, as well as the variety of technologies that they experimented with and used. Their paper also identifies barriers to using technology and implications for future uses of digital technologies in classrooms.

The final paper in this volume by Lu´ısa Mota Ribeiro and colleagues offers an insight into teaching during the pandemic from the perspective of parents who had to take on responsibilities for their children's learning during school closures since early 2020. Involving a large set of online questionnaire data from 21,333 parents in Portugal whose children were attending primary and secondary schools, the chapter offers insight into how the parents supported their children in different ways during home schooling. The authors also found variations in roles performed by parents according to the gender of children, type of schools and curriculum.

The authors who contributed to the Special Issue reflected on how educational institutions might need to rethink their teaching and learning provision as we learn to live with health and other emergencies, such as COVID-19. The knowledge that we can gain from exploring the developments of teaching and learning approaches in many countries and educational contexts in response to the pandemic would be useful for all stakeholders in education to reconsider the future of education and meet the challenges in the months and possibly years to come.

> **Palitha Edirisingha** *Editor*
