Abstract:

Undoubtedly, Covid-19 is having a tremendous impact on life as we used to know it and on the ways by which teaching and learning are carried out and perceived as experience. According to this, educational research investigates the new, challenging “assignments” that educators are called upon to face, putting in evidence what characterizes the experiences of teachers and parents engaged in educational tasks in this difficult moment.

This paper wants to contribute to a better understanding of this issue and, for this reason, it presents selected data from a broader research about the educational practices implemented by teachers and parents to support middle-school students in learning how to manage their emotions and behaviors. The overarching projected is based on a phenomenological approach with 50 semi-structured interviews conducted with 23 middle-school teachers and 27 parents of preadolescents who have been involved in the study using a snowball sampling technique focused on the Trentino region, in Northern Italy. Each interview has been audio-recorded and later transcribed and restituted to participants.

The data corpus, composed of approximately 750 pages of interview transcripts, is being analyzed using qualitative content analysis. The occurrence of the pandemic outbreak at the very beginning of the data gathering phase has however determined not only a shift towards an online modality of data collection, but also the emergence and recurrence, during the interviews, of narrations regarding which strategies and actions teachers were employing with students to take care of their emotional well-being and to keep them engaged in activities aimed at promoting their sense of belonging in the (virtual) classroom. Those particular excerpts - regarding distance learning in times of pandemic - have been coded in a separate section of the whole coding, and data retrieved from teachers’ interviews are the focus of this paper.

Keywords:

Distance learning, students' emotional well-being, educational practices.