Beyond dominant narratives of vulnerability and losses in learning, our participants offered counternarratives that stressed their capacities to rise and meet the times. This paper reports on the feelings, thoughts and experiences of eight Year 9 and 10 students in NSW and Victoria about the initial period of online learning in Australian schools that resulted from the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020 when schooling was abruptly reconfigured by the pandemic, young people were required to demonstrate new capabilities to manage their learning and their wellbeing. Beyond the pandemic, contact with birth relatives can be enhanced through technology. The findings reflect a shift in caseworker perceptions of technology‐facilitated contact from a risk to opportunity framework as a result of COVID‐19 conditions, consistent with social shaping of technology theory.

Third, caseworkers noted that technology‐facilitated communication enabled greater choice and control for children while requiring renegotiating boundaries. Second, caseworkers discussed how spending time together virtually could build trust, as carers and birth relatives could forge relationships around shared commitment to the child's wellbeing. First, caseworkers described how contact via technologies involved fewer logistical arrangements, shifting the focus on interactions among children and their two families and encouraging these to be flexible and child‐centred. Three key themes characterized the changes in caseworker practices and how these impacted upon social interactions between children and their birth and carer families: communication, not location shared not separate spaces and spontaneous not restricted interaction. In an action research study, 33 caseworkers in New South Wales, Australia, reflected upon adapting their practices. This required a shift to using technologies, which was previously underutilized and viewed as risky. Social distancing due to COVID‐19 forced changes to contact with birth relatives for children in out‐of‐home care. The article provides a timely empirically-based examination of the delivery of skill-based intensives online during a challenging and destabilising period, the associated teaching processes, and the technological affordances.

The implication being, that these factors can become solid foundations for transformational online learning in dynamic teaching environments.

These are: responsiveness, collective leadership, dynamic interaction between staff and students, and critical reflection. The thematic analysis identifies four pedagogical and heutagogical factors vital for educating during such a time. Co-operative Inquiry is used to critically reflect on the ‘hard’ technological applications and engagements experienced by social work academics, and learning and teaching technologists from a university, who urgently developed and delivered intensives online during this complex time. In response to this unprecedented and demanding situation and from the perception of the inquirers, this article documents the critical pedagogical and heutagogical factors associated with teaching practice-skills online, during the current challenging and destabilising epoch. Across the globe, campuses closed suddenly, meaning students and staff had to quickly transition to online platforms to sustain teaching and learning interactions. The COVID-19 global pandemic radically disrupted face-to-face teaching of practice-skills within social work programs in many countries.

Online social work journal