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COVID-19 has continued to effect higher education globally in significant ways. During 2020, many institutions shifted learning online overnight as the sector closed its doors and opened new sites for remote teaching. This article reports on an international study [Phillips et al., 2021] that sought to capture how cross-sectoral teachers experienced these emergency changes during the first months of restrictions. The data, analysed using narrative identity theory, revealed concerns that fall into two broad categories: technologies and relationships. Significantly, it was not a loss of content delivery or changes to assessment that prompted the greatest anxiety for our colleagues, but that they held significant concerns about their students' mental health; inequities of access to a range of services including technological; and challenges connecting emotionally with their students at a distance. The results provide actionable strategies for higher education institutions to apply in future emergencies where remote teaching is necessary.

Something changed during the pandemic; we attuned to a call. A call to action, breathing, support, activism, care, well-being, community, minimised mobilities, planetary health and our relations to all these things, and more. We are women working in education spaces across multiple communities, responsive to ongoing matters of concern (Latour, 2008), aware that our rhizomic connections have no middle or end. We use the method and metaphor of the quilt in this collaboration and hold quilting as a Feminist intervention, a return to her-stories and ways of knowing through story as we stitch together cultural and material stories of place. Our COVID-19 chronicles are a creative, collaborative exploration of the initial impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on learning and teaching across our respective countries. This paper is a collaboration of critical auto-ethnographies (Holman Jones, 2016), quilted and stitched together by a group of education scholars who united to research the impact of online emergency teaching that forced education site closures globally. Through this collaborative image quilting, we curated responses to our initial 100-word stories of pandemic life in 2020, that we had posted on a collaborative Padlet. Feminist, storying, and ethnographic theory inform alignment and stitching of each 100-word patch.

The COVID-19 pandemic jolted teachers to the front line of complex, under resourced negotiation of quality distance learning, whilst also being key communicators with students and families about how to be COVID safe. Media reports debated preschool and school closures and child safety, but scarcely considered teachers. Motivated by the silencing of teachers and extraordinary changes to education, we gathered as a group of nine educational researchers located in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and U.S.A to create a survey platform for teachers’ lived experiences of the impact of COVID-19. Our survey asked 22 questions and attracted 624 responses. This article focuses on question 12: What are the issues you are struggling with and need support with? Drawing from Latour’s provocation we distil key ‘matters of concern’ from the data, illustrated by excerpts from teacher responses and echoed by the authors’ COVID lived experiences as interwoven blackout poetry. Our collated experiences highlight struggles with online learning, connectivity/communication with students and families, quality of teaching, and workload, and the need to value and invest in education and the professionalism of teachers to address these struggles.