Teachers’ Emotional Experiences during COVID-19: A Narrative Inquiry

Abstract

Teaching became harder during the pandemic. More specifically, elementary teachers were expected to monitor student health on top of teaching curriculum, they were required to find creative ways to maintain relationships with students, and they needed to coach parents on implementing daily lessons. Changes to the profession such as these are likely to bring up emotions in teachers. Indeed, teachers who taught virtually during the pandemic were more anxious than in-person teachers. Teachers also reported feeling uncertainty and emotional exhaustion during the pandemic. Therefore, the pandemic was clearly an emotional experience for some teachers. However, pandemic research to date has focused on emotion-adjacent outcomes such as efficacy or identity, or has a narrow scope of emotion data due to quantitative methodology. This omission led me to select an open-ended methodology, narrative inquiry, that allowed me to dive deep into teachers’ emotions and the experiences and context surrounding them. Precisely, I conducted a narrative inquiry to tell the stories of three Alberta elementary teachers' emotional experiences during the pandemic. In this thesis, I incorporated elements of Labov’s structural episodic analysis and Clandinin and Connelly’s restorying thereby creating an integrated analysis framework that allowed me to both deconstruct participants' narratives into their structural components and reconstruct them into restoried narratives as a process of meaning-making. I situate these findings in existing psychological literature and discuss methodological and practical implications.