A Picture, a Lighthouse, a Kite: Metaphors of Emergency Teaching

This study presents the metaphors that emerged from a group of 22 teachers interviewed about their switch to remote instruction during the COVID-19 pandemic. The main theoretical framework adopted to study the emergency teaching situation (Hodges et al., 2020) was that of smart learning, defined as ‘context-aware ubiquitous learning’ (Hwang, 2014) and as centred on content, rather than on devices (Gwak, 2010). Primary school teachers from Italy were interviewed about online and smart learning. Following the idea that proficiency can not exist without the ability to reflect on and about actions (Nuzzaci 201), participants were asked to describe their experiences by choosing images or ideas that would represent them. The use of metaphors allowed us to better understand their feelings related to the condition of emergency teaching. Data from the interviews was classified in four emerging themes used by participants: a. distance – picturing themselves as TV characters only available to students through a screen, or as pictures hanging from a wall, teachers felt the weight of barriers over their relationships with classes; b. responsibility and co-responsibility – reflection became an opportunity to question responsibility, as teachers felt like a lighthouse for their pupils, trying to help in overcoming their difficulties; other sea-related metaphors, like that of a lone sailor and a huge storm, or a deep abyss, tell the story of a very difficult situation in which references were lost; on a more positive note, some teachers saw this situation as a possibility for the blooming of new competencies and new co-responsibility links with families – a kite built with pupils but led by a teacher; c. the wasteland – this group of metaphors mostly involved Special Education teachers, who felt disconnected from pupils ‘like a rock at the bottom of a river’, or screaming in a nightmare depicted as a variant of Munch’s Scream; the difficulty or impossibility to have meaningful relationships with children with special needs affected the teachers’ morale and sense of fear; d. travelling between two worlds – seeing the remote teaching experience as a journey, teachers felt like abandoning a well-known habitat to explore distant and unexplored worlds, mostly based on an ‘analogic vs digital’ discourse; many participants felt that this change was non-reversible, as the future scenarios will always have to come to terms with what happened during the pandemic period.