Introduction

The sudden school suspension enacted in Indonesia on March 24, 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic forced all teachers to shift into remote learning. A study by Ginting et al. (2021) found that teachers demonstrated their readiness to host emergency remote teaching during the pandemic. Fachriansyah (2020) reported that teachers were left with little support for optimal online learning. During the suspension, emergency remote teaching was conducted with varying levels of engagement. “At best, a few teachers managed to execute online learning by engaging students in video conferences and different learning management systems (LMS). At worst, however, learning simply did not take place for many students” (Lie et al., 2020, p. 805). These teachers lacked resources to engage in emergency remote teaching and did not develop their technological pedagogical and content knowledge (TPACK), as many of their students did not have access to internet connections and other necessary gadgets (Allo, 2020; Lie et al., 2020). In between those two points, students were still grappling with their readiness and motivation (Prijambodo & Lie, 2021) to participate in video-conferencing sessions in their classes.

The decline of Covid-19 cases in Indonesia in August 2021 coincided with reports that prolonged school closure had caused learning loss (Azevedo et al., 2021; Covid-19 is widening Indonesia’s education gap, 2020; Loasana, 2021; Purwaningsih & Lie, in press;). This situation prompted the Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture (MoEC) to instruct schools to reopen on condition that stringent health protocols during the implementation of limited face-to-face learning be fulfilled and that parents give their consent. In the wake of the school reopening, issues of hybrid and blended learning have emerged in the discourses of education stakeholders. In January 2022, schools started to open in varying degrees of hybridity (percentage of students in attendance), depending on the outbreak severity level in each region.

The pandemic disruption magnified the widening digital divide due to pre-existing socio-economic factors across the country. Our previous study (Lie et al., 2020) examined 18 teachers from four provinces in Indonesia and found four out of five levels of engagement ranging from little or no online learning at all through intermediate level involving an interplay of related factors with online learning processes, as summed up in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Levels of online learning engagement and the factors (Lie et al., 2020)

None of the teachers in our previous study reached an advanced level of online learning engagement in the first semester of remote learning from March to June of 2020. The range from little or no online learning at all through intermediate level was related to five factors, namely “the learners, teachers’ prior exposure to distance learning, technological knowledge, pedagogical knowledge and support system” (p. 816).

Numerous studies on distance learning during the pandemic have been published (Akram et al., 2021; Alshammari, 2021; Bozkurt & Sharma, 2020; Hadriana et al., 2021; Hodges et al., 2020; Lie et al., 2020; Mahdum et al., 2019; Prijambodo & Lie, 2021; Spoel et al., 2020). These studies focused on the occurrences of online learning, including students’ and teachers’ motivations, behaviors, and performances. In countries where Covid-19 cases began to decline and where governments reopened schools, the transition from remote learning to face-to-face schooling became a blank space for researchers to fill in and help education policymakers with insights on stakeholders’ readiness. The unpredictability of the pandemic situation set a precarious stage for the implementation of limited face-to-face learning. The Indonesian Ministry of Education and Culture prescribed that no more than 50% of the students could be present on-site with strict health protocols and parents’ consent. This mandate entailed teachers’ readiness to design and manage blended or hybrid learning. Questions about teachers’ TPACK competence including their progression during the remote learning period and the sustainability of the newly acquired skills emerged, as the research gap this study intended to fill in.

In this study, 18 teachers who were involved in our previous study were recontacted and invited to participate in this current study. This study aimed to find out their progression within a period of twenty months and explored two issues:

1. How had teachers progressed in their online learning engagement in reference to the Degrees of Appropriation during emergency remote teaching (ERT)?
2. How was teachers’ readiness to sustain their TPACK skills in the context of hybrid learning?

Literature Review

Two main theoretical frameworks used as references in this study are the five degrees of appropriation (Grossman et al., 1999) and TPACK (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). Based on the activity theory evolving from the work of Vygotsky (1978, 1987), Grossman et al. (1999) list five degrees of appropriation to reflect degrees of in-depth understanding: lack of appropriation, appropriating a label, appropriating surface structures, appropriating cultural underpinnings, and achieving mastery. They explain that these levels are not consecutive stages to be reached as appropriation is a construct that does not accommodate stages of development; rather, it consists of a cluster of various relations to an artifact, as active and dynamic social and communicative processes. “Appropriation refers to the process through which a person adopts the pedagogical tools available for use in particular social environments (e.g., classrooms) and through this process internalizes ways of thinking endemic to specific cultural practices” (p. 15).

Furthermore, Grossman et al. extend the concept of appropriation in conjunction with activity settings and pedagogical tools. “Activity settings encourage particular social practices that presumably participants will come to see as worthwhile means to a better future. Activity settings provide constraints and affordances that channel, limit, and support learners' efforts to adopt the prevailing social practices” (pp. 6-7). Pedagogical tools include conceptual and practical tools.

The second theoretical framework is TPACK, a model that was first introduced by Mishra and Koehler (2006) by adding technology knowledge to complement pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) model by Shulman (1986). In the TPACK framework, three domains for teachers to master are:

1. pedagogical knowledge (PK): understanding of teaching-learning approaches, methods, and techniques, and evaluation.
2. content knowledge (CK): understanding of the subject matter taught.
3. technological knowledge (TK): the knowledge of the technology used to enhance educational practices.

Those three domains then form an interplay of PCK, TPK, and TCK described as follows:

PCK (Pedagogical Content Knowledge) is teachers’ knowledge of maintaining optimal teaching strategies required for presenting the intended teaching content.

TPK (Technological Pedagogical Knowledge) is teachers’ knowledge of utilizing technology in instructional practices

TCK (Technological Content Knowledge) is teachers’ knowledge of presenting the teaching content by the use of technology.

Finally, as an amalgam of three overlapped domains of teachers’ knowledge, TPACK is teachers’ knowledge of fostering students' learning of a specific teaching content by the use of optimal technology and pedagogy. In conclusion, the TPACK model demonstrates how to combine technology with pedagogy and subject-matter expertise to provide more relevant teaching approaches that may fulfill 21st-century expectations.

There have been numerous studies referring to Grossman et al. (1999), as well as Mishra and Koehler (2006). Lund (2003) adopted Grossman et al.’s (1999) appropriation theory to study beliefs, practices, and appropriation of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers in information communication technology (ICT) rich environments and offered a similar leveling of teachers’ in-depth understanding of their pedagogical practices. In their study of new teachers' reflections and learning, Sanchez et al. (2022) refer to both conceptions and practices, as iterated by Grossman et al. (1999), and conclude that teachers need not only conceptual tools like principles, frameworks, and heuristics to consolidate understanding, but also practical tools like strategies, methods, and practices. In her study of onsite coaching for prospective teachers, Hinojosa (2022) focused on stage three of the framework (Grossman et al., 1999) to illustrate the systematic developmental process, in which teachers deliberately enacted instructional strategies from university course work.

The other reference in this study, the TPACK model has gained popularity as teachers have had to resort to technology integration in their remote teaching. By the same token, this model was widely used by researchers particularly during the pandemic remote teaching. Lee et al. (2022) conducted a bibliometric analysis of TPACK from 2011 to 2020 retrieved from the Scopus databases and found 700 articles, representing 63 countries and 159 journals. They also found that the number of articles on TPACK is on the rise every year. The reference to TPACK has gradually turned to practical strategies to facilitate teachers to implement technology-assisted teaching.

This present study pairs both Degrees of Appropriation (Grossman et al., 1999) and TPACK (Mishra & Koehler, 2003) to explore teachers’ progression in their TPACK skills during the ERT and their readiness to sustain those skills beyond the pandemic. Grossman et al’s article (1999) does not address the use of technology in the teaching of English but the discussion on appropriating “pedagogical tools” in particular activity settings is a useful reference to highlight the findings of our previous study (Lie et al., 2020) and to elucidate the appropriation and maintenance of TPACK in the present study. This article suggests benchmarking the findings from our previous research (Lie et al., 2020) against the five degrees of appropriation (Grossman et al., 1999) as seen in the following table.

Table 1: Levels of online learning engagement and five degrees of appropriation

Furthermore, this current study uses the appropriation framework (Grossman et al., 1999) to explain teachers’ progression in their online learning performances twenty months after the sudden shift. In the context of our current study, we took into account the pedagogical tools, including conceptual and practical tools. The conceptual tools are principles, frameworks, and ideas about teaching and learning a language while practical tools are their technological skills ingrained into the TPACK framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006).

Research Method

This longitudinal case study spanned through a period of twenty months and looked into teachers’ progression during the remote learning period. Our previous study (Lie et al. 2020) examined 18 teachers from four provinces in Indonesia and found four levels of engagement ranging from little or no online learning at all through intermediate level involving an interplay of five related factors of online learning processes. Learners, teachers' prior experience in remote learning, knowledge of technology, pedagogy, and a support system are the five factors. Data collection in that study occurred from March through mid-June 2020. When data collection was completed, contact with these teachers was maintained in a WhatsApp group.

Contexts and participants

The school closure accelerated many teachers to grasp the technological knowledge to sustain remote learning, as well as prevented many others from delivering learning at all. Almost two years after the sudden shift to remote learning, teachers in our previous study (Lie et al., 2020) were re-contacted in September 2021 and invited to participate in this reported study. The study collected data through a questionnaire, interviews of teachers and their students, and observations of their online class. An online questionnaire was first sent to the eighteen teachers from four regions in Indonesia. One item in the questionnaire asked about their willingness to participate in a further study, which involved in-depth interviews with the teachers, online class observations, and a group interview with five students for each teacher. Seven consented, but along the way, one of them quit the project.

The seven teachers (five female and two male) had varying years of teaching experience. One was a novice teacher with less than five years of teaching experience, three were senior teachers with more than fifteen years and the other three had taught between 10 to 15 years. Six of them taught English covering all the four language skills and one taught Bahasa Indonesia. See Table 3 for teacher participants’ initial online learning engagement level a few months after the school suspension started and their contexts almost two years afterwards.

Data collection and analysis

This study used a mixed method approach (Creswell, 2014), employing three instruments of data collection: questionnaire, in-depth teacher interviews, and observation of online class recordings. As triangulation, online focus group discussions (FGD) with a group of five students per teacher were conducted. Table 2 shows the use of instruments.

Table 2: Research Design

In reference to Schmidt et al. (2009) who developed a questionnaire to operationalize Mishra and Koehler’s model (2006), this study constructed a questionnaire capturing the seven domains of TPACK: Technological Knowledge (TK), Pedagogical Knowledge (PK), Content Knowledge (CK), Technological Pedagogical Knowledge (TPK), Technological Content Knowledge (TCK), Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK), and Technological Pedagogical and Content Knowledge by further adapting instruments developed by Rolando et al. (2021) and Zaeni et al. (2021). The TPACK instrument by Rolando et al. (2021) was targeted for biology teachers while that of Zaeni et al. (2021) integrated higher order thinking skills (HOTS) into the items intended for math teachers. Therefore, this study modified some statements from both instruments and created new items catered to language teachers. Then, more items were adapted from Lund (2003), who investigated English teachers’ appropriation in ICT-rich environments.

Some items pertaining to seven TPACK domains were provided with paired statements to reveal their TPACK ability in the beginning of their distance learning journey from March to April of 2020 and the situation in September of 2021. The questionnaire was piloted to five teachers and some items were revised accordingly. The validation of the questionnaire engaged a total of 145 teachers of English and Indonesian from 50 senior high schools, 35 junior high schools, and five elementary schools from 56 cities in 13 provinces in Indonesia in early September of 2021. Through some statistical analysis, the validation study found the questionnaire to be valid and reliable. The item analysis using confirmatory factor analysis has indicated the valid measurement of the survey items. Five of the six indicators have been reported as ‘fit’ with only one ‘marginal fit.’ The construct reliability value has been reported to range between .71 and .94 indicating the confirmation of the reliable survey items (Tamah et al., 2022). The questionnaire is available in Appendix 1.

A rubric (See Appendix 3) was developed to guide the class recordings observation. The rubric covers factors related to the implementation of TPACK: teacher, students, platforms/tools, and learning processes. In-depth interview and FGD questions were formulated by the researchers’ team involving a pre-service teacher and an in-service teacher. Then, the questions were tried out with five teachers not involved in the study and revised accordingly before administering them to the study participants (see Appendix 2 for interview prompts).

After a briefing on the written research procedures via Zoom video-conferencing application, all seven teachers signed an informed consent form and filled in the online questionnaire in mid-September of 2021. Then, after the teachers had taught their online classes from October to November of 2021 and sent the recordings, each of them was interviewed online and were asked to choose five students to meet online with the researchers for an FGD. For the first three study participants, all three researchers were present in the interviews and FGDs and assessed the class recordings to fine-tune the instruments and establish inter-interviewer reliability. Afterwards, two researchers did each observation, interview, and FGD.

Responses from the questionnaire were used as preliminary data to describe the context and challenges of emergency remote teaching for the six teachers in this study. The challenges they faced during the imposed learn-from-home mode were further revealed through a case study of six teachers. Observation results of the six class recordings were compared with those conducted in April 2020 in our previous study when they just started their emergency remote teaching. Data from in-depth interviews and FGDs with students demonstrated how the extended suspension of face-to-face classroom meetings had enabled teachers to appropriate their TPACK abilities to adjust their teaching practices to the continuing remote learning.

To answer the research questions, responses from the questionnaire were analyzed through descriptive statistics on SPSS, verified with teacher interview and observation results and triangulated with results of FGDs with students of each teacher. Qualitative data from observations, interviews and FGDs were coded and clustered by themes using NVivo.

Findings and Discussion

In light of the enormous information and insights out of our data, findings presented in this paper are mostly summaries of the results. All names are pseudonyms and all teachers’ quotes are written as is.

Prior to presenting and discussing the findings to address the research questions, Table 3 presents an overview of the study participants’ progression over a period of twenty months.

Table 3: Participants’ online learning engagement

To answer the two research questions, this study attempted to track the progression of the seven teachers as listed in Table 3 from the beginning of the pandemic suspension to September, 2021.

Progression of online learning engagement in reference to degrees of appropriation

In March to June of 2020, two of these seven teachers admitted using little or no online learning in their classes, one at the Rudimentary level, one Basic, three Intermediate, and none Advanced. In Grossman’s (1999) framework, two were at the lack of appropriation, one at the appropriating a label, one at appropriating surface structures, three at appropriating conceptual underpinnings and none at achieving mastery. One month after starting this current study, one of the two teachers who admitted no or little online learning in 2020 quit the project stating that she “did not have much progress because of the overwhelming constraints” (Rosa, 7 October 2021). Teaching in a remote region where students’ access to the internet and gadgets was very limited, this teacher seemed to stall at the lack of appropriation level and revealed that the constraints dominated affordances, thereby reducing technology’s functional potential in her activity context.

The other teacher Aaron, who had been at the lack of appropriation level at the beginning of the pandemic, significantly jumped to the appropriating conceptual underpinnings level twenty months afterwards while three teachers remained at the same level as before – Andy at the appropriating surface structures level, Alisa at the appropriating surface structures level, and Paula at the appropriating conceptual underpinnings level. On a positive note, this study reveals that two teachers who had reached appropriating conceptual underpinnings at the beginning of the school suspension in 2020 progressed into achieving mastery. In summary, this graph shows the teachers’ levels of progression (Figure 2).

Notes: 1: Lack of Appropriation; 2: Appropriating a Label; 3: Appropriating Surface Structures; 4: Appropriating Conceptual Underpinnings; 5: Achieving Mastery

Figure 2: Teachers’ progression of the appropriation levels

The graph shows an overall progression of the study participants over a period of twenty months. Findings and discussion of individual cases, particularly on how they progressed higher or remained at the same level, are organized, based on self-perceived data from teachers’ questionnaire responses and interviews, followed with those as perceived by others from online class observations and students’ FGDs.

Self-Perceived

The self-perceived appropriation of TPACK during the school closure is revealed through the questionnaire results and teachers’ in-depth interviews. The questionnaire elicited teachers’ perceptions of their TPACK abilities on the seven domains through 26 pairs of statements on a Likert scale of 1 (strongly disagree) to 4 (strongly agree). The following Table 4 presents a summary of the questionnaire results on the seven TPACK domains. Each number is an average of their chosen responses to the statements within each domain.

Notes: Then refers to March-April 2020; Current refers to September 2021.
Table 4: Results of the teachers’ self-perceived abilities on the seven domains of TPACK

The results showed that on average there was an increase in their self-perceived TPACK abilities on all seven domains. The increase spans from 0.50 to 0.90 except for the Content Knowledge domain, which yields only 0.05 increase.

Furthermore, the questionnaire also put five pairs of questions asking respondents what technology they used at the beginning of the remote learning period and currently. A summary of the responses is presented in Table 5.

Table 5: Online class technology use

This table shows there is no significant change in the use of video-conferences tools and LMS. This constancy may be due to the quick mandate by the education authority for all schools in their respective regions to use particular platforms. Amidst all the available platforms, Microsoft and Google stood out as winners due to the authority’s mandate.

As a communication channel among education stakeholders, WhatsApp remained popular as it has always been among the general public in Indonesia. As a matter of fact, the very first action by teachers, as soon as the Ministry of Education and Culture announced school suspension in March 2020, was establishing WhatsApp groups with their students. This communication channel was still being maintained to complement the use of LMS. In the interview, one of the teachers in this study stated that he did not use any LMS in the few months following the school suspension announcement and so expanded the use of WhatsApp as a substitute for LMS to send materials and assignments, as well as receive students’ works. In our previous study, this teacher admitted that little or no learning processes happened due to various reasons (Lie et al., 2020). When probed about his current situation, he mentioned using Google Classroom as an LMS but still did not use any of the supporting applications that other teachers did as reported in Table 5. The rest of the teachers in this study reported using a more variety of supporting applications and learning resources. In interviews, they mentioned that, over the months, they had learned to try and use them to make their online classes more engaging.

As perceived by others

Aaron who had progressed from the lack of appropriation level at the beginning of the pandemic to appropriating conceptual underpinnings twenty months afterwards was reported as a better teacher than before by his students in the FGD. They could understand his teaching and appreciated his use of English most of the class time. He used Google Meet and shared his content on PowerPoint animated to support his content explanation. He never engaged students in group work on the synchronous sessions and, yet, he had done his best to make the class activities more interactive by asking questions and giving students the chance to ask questions. Therefore, on a scale of 1-10, students rated him 9. One student in the FGD reported and was confirmed by the others, out of 33 students in his class, only 22 of them could consistently participate in his video conferences. The rest had access issues.

Aaron’s class recording started with 14 students online and ended with only 11 of them, most of whom were off camera. As the students reported in the FGD, his class on narrative texts was engaging with his animated PowerPoint slides, and he frequently annotated some points on the slide to make the points across. He swiftly switched between explanations and questioning to monitor students’ understanding. Moreover, he occasionally praised students for giving out correct answers. In brief, although Aaron did not use a great variety of learning technology to support his teaching, he picked only a few – Google Meet and PowerPoint – and used these very basic platforms effectively to support his pedagogy and content delivery. In reference to Grossman et al. (1999), this teacher was aware of his constraints during the pandemic:

For my personal job as a teacher during this pandemic, I try my best to teach every… on every schedule that I have. But the basic problem that I have is most of the students, they are not serious to fulfil the online classes, so the reason is… the major reason is they have signal problems, they don’t have enough financial support to buy the credit for their mobile phone. I think those two factors are the main causes that are blocking the students to take part actively. (Aaron, 19 October 2021).

He knew that applying more attractive platforms would be more engaging for some of his students but realized that many others would not be able to participate due to the connection issues. Therefore, he adopted the pedagogical tools available for use in particular social environments (e.g., his class of mixed socio-economic classes) and through this process internalized ways of thinking endemic to specific cultural practices (e.g., using videoconferences to share his animated PowerPoint and deliver the content). Pedagogical tools include conceptual and practical tools. In the context of our current study, conceptual tools are the teachers’ principles and ideas about their content while practical tools are their technological skills ingrained into their TPACK (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). He chose to use the basic technology and did his best to engage his students through his pedagogical tools. In brief, he did not let the constraints hinder the affordances of his pedagogy.

On a different note, Andy, Alisa, and Paula remained at the same level. At the beginning of the pandemic, they went through IT training and attempted to innovate in their teaching, but, over the months, they got tired of the available resources. Like Aaron, they did not make use of the variety of technological tools and demonstrated teacher-centered style. However, unlike Aaron, these teachers did not manage to reconcile their practical tools with the pedagogical tools to meet the educational needs of their students. In other words, these three teachers did not employ technology to engage their students, enhance their pedagogy, and achieve the learning objectives.

On a brighter note, in addition to the basic video-conferencing tools and the LMS, two teachers who achieved mastery demonstrated skills in employing a variety of learning apps, such as Padlet, Kahoot, Mentimeter, and YouTube clips, to engage students and deliver their materials. On the flip side, instead of explaining the content materials themselves, these two teachers asked their students to listen to downloaded digital materials (YouTube Clip and some E-modules). Afterwards, they emphasized the important points of the digital materials. During their online classes, their activities were interrupted with a few technical glitches. Yet, this constraint did not deter them from continuing to use a variety of tools. At the appropriation of conceptual underpinnings level at the beginning of the pandemic, these teachers used “the tools in innovative ways and/or in new contexts. Such teachers might design integration programs, ICT-rich environments, and situations conducive to learning where technologies are integrated in disciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and social relations'' (Lund, 2003, p. 50). Almost two years afterwards, they further upgraded their TPACK skills and achieved mastery.

To sustain the innovative practices and achieve mastery, these two teachers managed to transform the synergy of conceptual and instrumental appropriation. They were not perfect yet and not 100% of their students could be engaged, but these teachers were able to adapt to current practices and discourses of online learning. In the perspective of Grossman et al. (1999), these teachers have situated themselves as learners in the activity setting of online learning and “appropriated the conceptual underpinnings of a pedagogical practice.” (p. 18) Their progress to the highest possible level of appropriation promises renewal and innovation. In his study of EFL teachers, Lund (2003) notes that “teachers would know how ICTs might infuse and change social practices (like learning a language through participation in diverse practices) and design environments and activities that are conducive to such practices.” (p. 50) At first observation of their recorded classes, the two teachers’ use of digital materials created by others seemed like shifting their own responsibility to technology. Nevertheless, this act of capitalizing on technology may signal coping strategies by non-native teachers of English to provide model language input for their students, as well as themselves. A study on the language use of teachers of English found that some teachers resisted using English as a medium of instruction because they were not confident about their English proficiency (Lie et al., 2022).

Grossman et al. (1999) mention two factors affecting appropriation are the social context of learning and the individual characteristics of the learner. This study does not deal with the second factor as exploring individual characteristics of teachers as learners would require further in-depth inquiry into each study participant. The first factor was visible in each teacher’s path during the 20-month period of remote learning. Their interactions with their students in their respective environments, the provision of online learning resources (gadgets, reliable internet connection, and resources), the authority mandate, and the learning community with their fellow teachers shaped their decision to choose what kind of technological tools they used and how they used them to support their content delivery and pedagogy.

Readiness to sustain TPACK skills to deliver hybrid learning

Regardless of the teachers’ appropriation level, most students in the FGDs expressed preference for offline learning over emergency remote teaching because they believed they performed better and needed non-virtual interactions with their classmates. A few of them opted for hybrid learning for fear of the potential third wave of the outbreak. In spite of students’ preferences, hybrid learning has been occurring in some schools and is likely to expand–pending on the outbreak potentials–to some others that have started to be completely offline since January 2022. In consideration of this context, it is worthwhile to inquire teachers’ readiness to sustain their TPACK skills to deliver hybrid learning.

Self-Perceived

A pair of statements in the questionnaire asked them to self-rate their TPACK abilities at the beginning of the pandemic closure and currently on a scale of 1-10 (very low-very high). Table 6 shows a summary of their responses.

Table 6: Self-rating of their overall TPACK abilities

Overall, there is an increase in their self-rating. However, two cases of anomaly emerged in one teacher Andy rating himself currently lower (5) than before (8) and another one Alisa rated herself low and the same (4) at the beginning of the pandemic suspension and currently. Andy’s self-perceived decline was also apparent in his responses on the TPACK domains. While his content knowledge (CK) was perceived to be improving, in three (TK, PCK, and TCK) out of the seven domains, he reported a decrease in his abilities (See Table 4). Probed about the decline, Andy mentioned in the interview that he had tried to upgrade his mastery of technology to enhance his online teaching and used them in his class. Nevertheless, he expressed his frustration that his teaching did not reach the learning outcomes as he found it challenging to monitor whether his students were on task during their remote learning. He often received complaints from some working parents that their children were not learning optimally at home as they were not able to supervise their children. Ironically, some of the submitted assignments indicated traces of parents’ work. In brief, despite all this effort to upgrade his professional competences and make his online class more engaging, he was not sure whether his seventh graders were learning.

Although Alisa reported consistent improvement across the seven TPACK domains, she rated herself low (4 out of 10) and did not report any improvement in her overall TPACK performance over the period of 20 months, In the interview, she said, “TPACK is new for me, and so I still need to learn a lot more.”

Teachers’ readiness to sustain TPACK competences to deliver hybrid learning was captured in two series of questions. Pertaining to the cognitive side, the first series of questions asked what they thought about their various roles in a technology-assisted learning environment with response choices of not important at all, insignificant, significant, anddetermining. Table 7 summarizes their responses.

Notes: 1 = Note important at all; 2 = Insignificant; 3 = Significant; 4 = Determining
Table 7: The importance of roles in a technology-assisted learning environment

The questions asked how important teachers perceived the various roles in a technology-assisted learning environment. The researchers then clustered those ten roles across the TPACK domains. Then, this series of questions was wrapped up in a question where teachers saw themselves in a technology-enhanced learning environment on a scale of 1 (traditional) through 8 (virtual). The responses are listed in Table 8.

Table 8: Teachers’ self-perception in the spectrum of traditional-virtual

Teachers who showed progression in their appropriation levels (Aaron, Salma, and Aurora) were leaning more towards perceiving their roles as virtual than traditional teachers. Those who remained at the same level rated themselves 5 and 6.

To complement the first series, the ten questions in the second series dealt with the affective side and asked about their beliefs and feelings as teachers in a technology-enhanced learning environment. Five of the questions were stated in affirmative statements while five others in negative statements as seen in Table 9.

Table 9: Statements eliciting teachers’ beliefs and feelings in technology-enhanced learning environment

The four choices are on a Likert scale of Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree. Four out of six teachers consistently responded Strongly Agree to all the affirmative statements and Strongly Disagree to all the negative ones. Alisa, who rated herself low in the other sets of questions, responded Agree to the affirmative statements and Disagree to the negative ones. Consistent with his previous responses, Andy gave ambivalent responses as he chose Strongly Agree to all the ten statements. In the interview, he explained his situation:

At the beginning of the pandemic, the school organized IT workshops for us, one of them is training on using Microsoft Teams. Now, I can use Teams pretty well.... We teachers have become more innovative and creative in designing our online class, hoping that our students will respond well. But as this pandemic continues and our learning processes are limited, we get tired. So do many students. Only a few students have demonstrated their best learning performances.… The other day, a couple of them presented their video clips on KineMaster very well, but the rest didn’t care. (Andy, 15 October 2021)

Moreover, he shared his experiences working in two conflicting environments _physical and virtual. His school had a policy of allowing students to learn from home while teachers taught from the school. They also allowed students who had no internet access to use the school computer lab. A few students in his class did that, and this situation gave him extra burden of supervising the students on-site while delivering the materials through videoconferences, ensuring the coverage of the curriculum content, and maintaining the LMS.

Although the Ministry recommended [that] we use the adaptive curriculum during this pandemic, I feel obliged to deliver all the prescribed content to my students. I would feel guilty if I didn’t. (Andy 15 October 2021)

As perceived by others

Delivering the curriculum content seemed to be Andy’s focus as seen in the video recording of his online class. There were 22 students in his class. He used Microsoft Teams in his class for the whole 60 minutes to teach procedural text and required that all his students be on-camera. He explained the learning materials deductively, starting with the rules and structures of different types of texts and asking students occasionally to make their own sentences. Some students were active, volunteering to answer, but there is no telling how many students were on task. During the 60-minute period, there was no group work in the learning activities, and no other supporting application was used. He used PowerPoint to present the learning objectives and explain the materials and student worksheets for exercises. Based on the observation rubric, his online engagement was at the higher point of rudimentary level on his technology use, but, on content and pedagogy, he reached the basic level, as he used a direct teaching strategy to deliver his content. Moreover, he attempted to contextualize the learning process by using examples of making local dishes. Although his class was teacher-centered, his learning objectives were met as shown in the students’ responses during class. Learning materials were either uploaded on LMS or sent to students prior to class.

In the FGD, Andy’s students confirmed that his teaching style made them understand the lesson, but they never did any collaborative work with other students. He explained the lesson clearly and gave them the chance to ask for clarification. His assignment on procedural text was to make a local dish at home and write the recipe, but they were not assigned to make any digital poster, video clip, or podcast out of the process. In the era where Tik Tok, Reel, and Podcast are used casually for social media postings, Andy’s indifference to multimodality in his online class, as reported by his students was very distinct compared to the other five teachers. Moreover, this minimal use of technology at the time of study seemed to conflict with his interview. However, a careful reading of all the data concerning Andy made sense of the discrepancy. He had “become more innovative and creative in designing his online class” after the series of IT training at the beginning of the school closure. Then, as this pandemic has dragged on indefinitely, his enthusiasm in technology use in his classroom has worn out.

Nevertheless, this observed phenomenon does not categorize him as an ineffective teacher. His commitment to content mastery and pedagogy prevailed over his willingness to integrate more advanced technology into his teaching.

The three teachers who demonstrated progression at appropriating TPACK skills were likely to be more ready for the hybrid learning. As a matter of fact, since August 2021, Salma has started conducting hybrid learning with 25% of her students attending her class offline and the rest online. In the interview, Salma talked about the difficulties of looking after students who were physically in her classroom and those on the video-conference platform. She had to use three gadgets in her hybrid classroom, the first for the videoconferencing, the second one to focus on her, and the last to focus on the whiteboard. Even after some experimenting in the first few weeks, she found hybrid teaching more complex than online teaching.

In summary, readiness to sustain TPACK skills in a hybrid learning requires that teachers not only adapt to and engage in current practices and discourses, a process of appropriating, but also transform themselves as perpetual learners, so that knowledge construction can be developed. In reality, however, as Grossman et al. (1999) suggests:

multiple and competing desired outcomes often coexist within an activity setting, though typically some predominate. The overriding motive for a setting, then, while not specifying the actions that take place, provides channels that encourage and discourage particular ways of thinking and acting. (p. 7)

In Andy’s case, for example, online teaching, as an activity setting, has conflicting goals. He was expected to innovate and engage his students with a variety of technological tools, but, at the same time, he felt compelled to deliver the content materials within the syllabus. In this challenging activity setting, Andy resorted to complying with the curriculum. At the appropriating a label level, “a person learns the name of a tool but knows none of its features” (Grossman et al., 1999, p. 16). Andy mentioned he underwent IT training at the beginning of the pandemic and perhaps attempted to use them at some point but, at the time of observation, resorted to perpetuating his teacher-centered pedagogy through his video conferences. For teachers like Andy, to anticipate hybrid learning or even further emergency remote teaching, improving practices in interaction with their learning environment and by the help of tools is currently a necessity in the face of uncertainty.

Conclusion and Recommendations

The pressure for schools to reopen and resume to the new normal led teachers and students to the path of hybrid learning. In the face of future uncertainty, teachers need to be prepared for any type of learning and equip themselves with the appropriate pedagogical and technological tools. This study has shed light on teachers’ appropriation of TPACK skills during the school closure and teachers’ readiness to sustain the skills to deliver hybrid learning.

To sum up, this study investigated teachers’ progression and stagnation in their appropriation levels of online learning engagement. Progression was not narrowly measured by the number of technological tools they used but by how they synergized the technology use with their contextual learning environments to support their pedagogy and content mastery. Teachers who demonstrated progression perceived themselves consistently on the cognitive and affective sides of integrating technology into their teaching. This optimistic perspective was enacted into their online class practices as confirmed by their students’ opinions and researchers’ observations of their online classes. Furthermore, these teachers admitted to more readiness to engage in hybrid learning than those who remained at the same level. In brief, teachers’ progression corresponded to their readiness to maintain their TPACK skills in hybrid learning. One caveat in these findings was that teachers’ stagnation in their appropriation of technology-enhanced learning did not mean they are bad teachers. As our previous study (Lie et al., 2020) revealed, some factors other than the teachers themselves determined their online learning engagement, such as students and the support system.

Hence, this study offers three recommendations for policy and better practices and several ideas for future research. First, in regard to the findings, teachers’ lack of readiness to sustain their TPACK skills in hybrid learning needs to be recognized. Teachers who resisted improving their technology use in this study were concerned about leaving their underprivileged students behind because of connectivity issues. Paradoxically, however, their reluctance to appropriate technology use during the remote learning has serious consequences. Other studies have revealed that teachers’ lack of readiness resulted in significant learning loss (Purwaningsih & Lie, in press). Therefore, this study urges the Indonesian government to identify reasons for teachers’ stagnation and execute recovery strategies to overcome the learning loss.

Second, as revealed in the cases of teachers who demonstrated progression, innovations in teaching and learning practices in the context of hybrid learning should be enhanced and shared with other teachers to build up the knowledge base of best practices in online learning.

Third, these best practices should prepare teachers to expand into blended learning. The distinction between the two models is not yet widely recognized in Indonesia. Lessons learned out of this study should propel strategic actions to provide quality education for all. Blended learning can serve as a breakthrough to carry technology-assisted learning for students in remote regions.

Finally, based on the current findings, several future research avenues are suggested. First, further research should be conducted to investigate how teachers used the lessons learned during the ERT to transform their pedagogical practices and what factors drove them to progress further beyond the pandemic. Second, it would be worthwhile to explore teachers’ readiness to venture into blended learning. How teachers’ readiness and motivation can propel the implementation of blended learning beyond the pandemic would contribute to the knowledge base of best practices given the various constraints. Third, longitudinal studies should also be conducted to further examine what recovery strategies teachers executed to overcome the learning loss during the pandemic. Finally, studies on the role of the school as an ecosystem in enhancing teachers’ pedagogical practices would give a more holistic understanding of the challenges and possibilities.

Due to the extended pandemic, face-to-face interviews and school visits were not possible. Interviews through video-conferencing tools limited this study to obtain rich data and follow a thorough data collection procedure, as Miles et al. (2014) suggested. Nevertheless, despite the limitations in the data collection and analysis as described, the researchers express hope to turn the table on the education constraints amidst the pandemic and to rely on teachers’ resilience in expanding their affordances.

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