Challenges Encountered by Pre-service Teachers in 1st District of Zambales During the Pandemics

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic forced a sudden and uneven restructuring of pre-service teacher education worldwide, yet the localized experience of Filipino pre-service teachers in the 1st District of Zambales — particularly across the four domains of medium of instruction, instructional resources, subject matter content, and pre-service teacher motivation — remains underdocumented. This study adopted a descriptive-survey design to characterize the pattern of challenges encountered by pre-service teachers deployed in the 1st District of Zambales during the pandemic. Respondents reported a relatively balanced specialization distribution (Science, Social Studies,English) and a four-domain challenge profile in which three of the four domains registered as High Challenge: medium of instruction, subject matter content, and pre-service teacher motivation. The instructional-resources domain contained within it the lowest-rated item — basic technology use — even though the domain itself spanned significant device and connectivity obstacles. The motivation domain surfaced as particularly pronounced, with reduced discussion interest as its leading item rather than a low-rated concern. Convergence between this Zambales pattern and three documented international restructurings — U.S. clinical-practice gaps, Turkish emergency-distance EFL practicum, and broader cross-specialization variation — locates the 1st District of Zambales experience within a recognizable global event rather than as a regional anomaly. The findings suggest that emergency-distance practicum can preserve readiness while imposing substantial constraint-profile costs on practitioners, and that these two outcomes need not be in tension. Implications for Philippine teacher-education policy are discussed, with particular attention to the design of remoteness-resilient practicum models.