‘One doesn’t just move online’: an intersectional analysis of teachers’ response to the crisis of pandemic teaching

ABSTRACT

While the educational emergency response to the COVID-19 pandemic centred on student learning and safety, teachers’ burnout, and teacher strikes, stories of teachers quitting the profession have left schools in crisis around the world. In this study, we use an intersectional approach to explore teacher experiences during the pandemic as ‘crisis experiences.’ The data presented in this study were obtained from an exploratory survey which recruited practicing PreK-12 and higher education teachers (n = 134) from 22 countries. The survey included closed- and open-ended questions related to teachers’ experiences teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. One-sample chi-square tests showed that quantitative variables of gender, previous experience teaching and learning online, and grade-level taught were significantly related to teacher anxiety. A descriptive approach to qualitative analysis identified three axes of the crisis which affected teachers’ experiences: teaching environment, teaching relationships, and systemic support. Findings show teachers had no choice or adequate time to prepare to transition online, increasing anxiety especially among women, those teaching younger grades, and those without experience teaching or learning online. Teachers’ work during the pandemic should be understood as ‘emergency remote teaching’ which has put teachers at greater risk for burnout and departure from the profession.

KEYWORDS:

• Emergency remote teaching
• teachers
• technology
• intersectionality
• crisis
• COVID-19

Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Jennifer Adams, Dr. Dominic Gullo, and Dr. Brian McCommons for useful discussions. We thank Drexel University’s School of Education for funding through the SoE Faculty Research Funding Initiative.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This study was approved by Drexel University’s Internal Review Board for Human Research Protection.

(Protocol #: 2003007699)

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Drexel University .