Vishwajit Pathare

19060322080

Experience of teachers during Pandemic

Name - Vishwajit Pathare

PRN - 19060322080
Email ID - vishwajit.pathare@ssla.edu.in
Subject - RM 3(Psychlology)

Table of Contents

Introduction ………………………………………………………………………………1
Research Question ………………………………………………………………………2
Significance of Research Question ………………………………………………………2
Literature Review …………………………………………………………………………3
Research Design …………………………………………………………………………...4
Limitations ………………………………………………………………………………5
Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………5
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………………6

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic, which hit India, changed the landscape of education. Teachers and

students had to shift from offline to online learning within a short period. This was happening

alongside the crisis already affecting various students' families, teachers, and the administrative

staff. Children could not go outside their homes and meet their friends and play or engage in

other social activities and also witnessed panic and anxiety in the adults around them. This

created a sense of insecurity (Unni, J. C., 2020).

The flip side was that educators had to deal with increasing student disengagement. Preparation

for online teaching required a lot more time and effort, and there was a feeling of disengagement

between teachers and students (Almpanis, T., & Joseph-Richard, P., 2022).

1
 Vishwajit Pathare
19060322080

This study aims to examine the teachers’ experience during the pandemic and their experience

dealing with the obstacles and disengagement during teaching.

Research Question

The research question for this paper is “What was the experience of teachers during the

COVID-19 pandemic with respect to the challenges of remote teaching and the disengagement

during classes?”

This would be done by doing qualitative interviews with teachers. The study will be limited to

teachers teaching in the Symbiosis School for Liberal Arts and will focus on the diversity of

lecturers within the university.

Significance of Research Question

While strategic solutions can be crafted and implemented to better equip ourselves in shifting to

online learning in a future crisis, this result would provide the context for the challenge.

Experiences, emotions, and language provided by this research can be used to draw broader

themes and aid in understanding a crisis' social, psychological, and emotional aspects for

teachers.

The rich and subjective data drawn from this research can lend understanding to other research

being done in this area and can be a complement and a test of proof for any metrics and

conclusions drawn in studies around the same subject. Since the research is open-ended, it can be

used to review existing literature, find confirmations and contradictions, and create further areas

of investigation and study.

2
 Vishwajit Pathare
19060322080

Literature Review

Since the study is qualitative, an extensive literature review would create a bias in the design and

the conclusions drawn from the data collected. Thus the literature review has been kept limited.

Two papers have been chosen for this. The first paper, relating to how academic institutions

reacted to the COVID-19 pandemic, would give the context of the changed situation. Another is

a study on a similar topic analyzing the experience of teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic

and giving a skeleton structure on the kind of questions that could be asked. While this does

carry the risk of biasing the data, since the study has been conducted in the United Kingdom, a

non-Asian country with very different challenges and culture, it gives scope for further

exploration and is also a good benchmark to compare and contrast with.

COVID-19 responsive teaching of undergraduate architecture programs in India: learnings for

post-pandemic education (Varma, M. 2020)

This paper explores how the changes in the education system in undergraduate courses for

Architecture programs in India were taken by the teachers and students, and the efficacy of the

changes/ It also gives views on what could be next for post-pandemic teaching in terms of the

possibilities presented by online and blended learning.

The methodology used for this study was a survey to obtain responses. The survey asked the

teachers and students about their individual and institutional background, how well they were

able to transition to an online mode of teaching, the ease and the efficacy of this mode of

teaching and learning, and their views on blended learning.

3
 Vishwajit Pathare
19060322080

Lecturing from home: Exploring academics’ experiences of remote teaching during a pandemic.

International Journal of Educational Research (Timos Almpanis, & Joseph-Richard, P. 2022)

This paper explores what the challenges were for teachers and how they responded to them. It

identified that a shift from traditional teaching to Online Distance Learning could not happen

without a proper understanding and training of technology and its relation to learning and

classroom pedagogy. Furthermore, teachers took longer to prepare classes which were quite

taxing during the pandemic. They used semi-structured interviews with academics from different

genders, teaching experiences, and fields of expertise.

The question framework they used provides an excellent blueprint for the proposed research. It

also brings in more context which can be explored, for example, the academic timeline during

which the shift to online learning happened and which part of the semester it was in. The main

challenges, solutions, and themes identified can be used to compare and contrast the research

findings.

Research Design

The study would use semi-structured interviews in the form of one-on-one physical interactions

with transcribed audios to collect teachers' experiences. Open-ended and probing questions

would be used to explore the answers and further elaborate on words and views that are given by

the participants. The questions would explore common day-to-day tasks teachers perform, such

as taking assessments, lectures, student interaction, and faculty interaction, their experience of

change while shifting to an online teaching mode, and how the experience might have changed

over the pandemic.

4
 Vishwajit Pathare
19060322080

This data will then be read and re-read to identify themes in the shared experiences, similarities,

and differences in the answers given. These can propose solutions, avenues for further research,

and new questions. Then, they would be matched with existing literature in the same line of

questioning to see where they complement and contradict each other.

Limitations

The research will be conducted only in a liberal arts college for undergraduate students. Thus, the

sample of participants would not be representative of most of the teachers of India, especially

since liberal arts colleges are a minority compared to a large number of engineering and medical

colleges.

Furthermore, the data collected, being qualitative, would not quantify the exact changes and

factors which might have affected the change and what changes made a comparatively more

significant impact. Quantitative studies using the proposed data with identified variables would

be required.

The data will be set in the context of a global pandemic with the entire world in lockdown. The

situations are not likely to be similar in other Online learning scenarios and thus would limit the

reliability of the data.

Lastly, since the data has been collected post-pandemic after a gap of 6 months, at a time when

colleges have opened up, and teachers have come back offline, it brings the validity of the data

into question.

Conclusion

Despite the limitations of the proposed research, it is still an essential endeavor to collect the

stories and experiences of teachers and give them as much value as other data collected. The

sample of this data is not large enough to give voice to the experiences of all the academia, but it

5
 Vishwajit Pathare
19060322080

will be a good start, and the themes and direct quotes collected from the data may resonate in

studies conducted in the future.

Bibliography

Unni, J. C. (2020). Social effects of Covid-19 pandemic on children in India. Indian Journal of

Practical Pediatrics, 22(2), 102-104.

Almpanis, T., & Joseph-Richard, P. (2022). Lecturing from home: Exploring academics’

experiences of remote teaching during a pandemic. International Journal of Educational Research

Open, 3, 100133. doi:10.1016/j.ijedro.2022.100133

Varma, M. (2020). COVID-19 responsive teaching of undergraduate architecture programs in

India: learnings for post-pandemic education. Archnet-IJAR: International Journal of

Architectural Research, ahead-of-print.

Timos Almpanis, & Joseph-Richard, P. (2022). Lecturing from home: Exploring academics’

experiences of remote teaching during a pandemic. International Journal of Educational Research

Open, 3, 100133. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedro.2022.100133