Lived Experiences of Early Childhood Teaching Interns in a Flexible Learning Environment

Abstract

In the Philippines, the flexible learning environment is still considered new and developing. The course has been modified to show how teaching interns manage their experiences, whether activities or assignments are best offered on-site or online, and how they perceive such experiences. Teaching internship is an important component of teacher education; it is expected that students would have gained the necessary skills and knowledge for the internship in terms of pedagogical subject matter. The descriptive qualitative phenomenological design was used in this study to obtain the most intuitive presentation possible, direct exploration, analysis, and description of the specific phenomena used in descriptive phenomenology on the lived experience of early childhood teaching interns in a flexible learning environment. Flexible learning in education results in a variety of lived experiences for student interns throughout their teaching internship. The findings indicate that undertaking an internship in a flexible learning environment requires student interns to overcome problems and impediments caused by changes in policies and teaching-learning modalities. The student interns found their way out of the numerous problems by relying on their persevering personal character and social aid. Despite the rigorous and tough periods, they felt appreciated and valuable in the end. The findings of this study will be useful to future researchers who wish to do similar studies on the same phenomena.