A Shibboleth is a code used to distinguish between different language and cultural groups - like the German counting scene from Inglorious Basterds, where they reveal they are spies by the manner in which they count on their hands. In teaching, what does a shibboleth look like, likely acronym galore, which is rather sad.
Let’s explore ways that the COVID experience has shaped teachers' work and created a sense of shared survival and thriving across this period.
Among the things listed, the authors note that
“Confidence and self-belief:
Greater confidence in ability as an educator
Confidence in integrating technology.” (Lemon & McDonough, 2023, P. 8)
Which to my eyes was a strong but short lived effect, where teachers bubbled with confidence, then simmered down to quietude.
But we also begun to:
“Cares for own wellbeing
Building a wellbeing literacy and expanding a selt-care toolbox for wellbeing.
Flexibility of time to balance work and personal/family life.
Engaged with self-care strategies to support wellbeing
Set boundaries around work-life balance.” (Lemon & McDonough, 2023, P.9).
This to me is the crux of it!
We went into COVID lockdown and such, and we learnt that self care was a thing - I don’t think many teachers have recovered at all. As a workforce I believe we have never returned to the level of work crush that we had prior.
We saw what easy work looked like, had a taste of most jobs, where you have time to yourself and time to just chill and care for you. And we down right liked it!
Flexibility! Unheard of in teaching, absolutely never happened.
Pregnant women and responsible children to elderly parents are forced back into timetable blocks and parents move care responsibilities, not the other way around. Teaching never bends, the teachers break - but the systems and structures remain unaltered. This was the primary learning of COVID and the lockdowns that affected mostly Victoria.
They note that, “One teacher may have drawn on strategies and skills associated with the emotional dimension, but did not do so independently of skills that were associated with other dimensions. We saw this for example in the way that social networks and contacts provided support within the social dimension, but also within the emotional dimension.” (Lemon & McDonough, 2023, P.12). This is a huge factor, and one that I feel may have been damaged following the hang over of COVID, where the activity level and strength of these social networks and contacts became less robust.
And that, “While teachers described the development of new skills, particularly in relation to the use of technology, these varied across school context and were dependent on localised good prac-tice, rather than good practice at the systemic level.” (Lemon & McDonough, 2023, P.13). So it’s not really a shared learning, instead it’s a: at my school, where we use product X, J and K, we solved this problem. So come to the point where some were looking for some ‘take aways’ or enduring lessons from the whole experience and you see that it’s all gone.
Part of the issues with this paper, which engages so strongly with the human elements is, “The omniscient third-person narrator so common in much academic work (not limited to the discipline of anthropological writing) about indigenous lifeworlds, masks the location of authors and their investments in illusory objectivities, where rigour is deemed not to proceed from ethicality but from distance (Smith, 2018, p.114).” (Moodie & Fricker, 2023, P.4). For a paper focussed on teacher resilience during COVID I found this one lacking in the human voice of said teachers - but maybe that’s just a me thing.
The overall effect of this is that “The settler colonial state, it's bureaucratic and political orientations, knowledge-making practices and educative functions, reinforces essentialist and individualised biological classifications of indigeneity because it is the fact of collective and ancestral ownership that describes Indigenous rights to land.” (Moodie & Fricker, 2023, P.10). Well that last bit doesn’t fit the point being made, but you get the idea.
COVID, I Feel Like Nothing Else Will Ever Be This Hard, and for many, nothing else was, because they left teaching and never came back!
References
Lemon, N., & McDonough, S. (2023, February). “I Feel Like Nothing Else Will Ever Be This Hard”: The Dimensions of Teacher Resilience during the COVID-19 Pandemic. In The Educational Forum (pp. 1-15). Routledge.
Moodie, N., & Fricker, A. (2023). Applying Decolonising Race Theory to the Aboriginal Voices project. The Australian Educational Researcher, 1-21.
Running Word Count (the second 100,000): 23,805