Abstract:

Covid-19 has represented a great challenge for the world of school, engaging teachers and students in a rapid changing process of their usual teaching and learning modalities [1] [2]. International literature has begun to investigate these aspects in order to better understand the involved dynamics and identify criticalities and improvement strategies [3] [4] [5].

The impact that this situation has had on the emotional and relational dimension of teaching and learning processes deserves particular attention, since its role is recognized as essential for good didactic and educational effectiveness [6] [7] [8].

The aim of this paper is to offer a contribution on this topic, starting from the analysis of some of the results obtained from a qualitative study conducted at the Department of Human Sciences of the University of Verona in order to investigate the experiences and the difficulties encountered by Italian teachers during the Covid-19 emergency period.

In Italy, all schools of all levels have been closed by government decree starting from March 5. This situation led to the need for a quick adaptation to distance teaching.

The study has involved 955 teachers teaching in kindergarten, primary school, middle school and high school. They were required to answer to the following open question: “Could you tell us something that you feel important to communicate about your current teaching experience? You can talk about the difficulties you have encountered, the fatigue, the significant things you have managed to realize…”. Data have been collected through the digital platform LimeSurvey and analyzed employing a methodological crossbreeding [9] between the phenomenological-eidetic method [10] [11] and the grounded-theory [12].

Results show that teachers believe that face-to-face teaching is irreplaceable: even if they recognize that distance teaching has been necessary during the emergency period, they underline, as an important element of criticality, the fact that the emotional and relational aspects are strongly penalized in this form of teaching. They report the difficulties and the efforts that they have made in order to ensure a didactic and educational continuity in spite of the limits caused by the lack of closeness and direct contact with their students and among the students themselves, thus highlighting how the emotional relational dimension plays a crucial role in the teaching and learning relationship.

The pandemic has accentuated the emotional challenges that teachers face in their daily practice, suggesting the need to rethink adequately targeted training spaces, both in the event of the need to continue with distance lessons and in the case of resuming face-to-face classes.

The results are discussed in relation to international literature and training proposals are outlined that focus on the emotional experience in the teaching and learning relationship with the aim to promote the well-being of teachers and students.

Keywords:

Covid-19, distance teaching, emotional and relational dimension, qualitative research.