Being a Primary School Teacher during the Pandemic: A Phenomenology Study

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected every aspect of life. In this sense, education was also negatively affected, interrupted and changed. Radical measures were taken for the education process in Turkey as in most countries of the world. Therefore, education shareholders experienced very different practices and instructional activities compared to time before the pandemic. Apart from the general measures in primary schools, different practices were implemented from time to time (such as distance teaching in city centers and face-to-face teaching in villages), and accordingly, primary school teachers had different experiences in the same period of time and attributed different meanings to teaching. This study aimed to make sense of the teaching experiences of primary teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants of the study, which was designed as descriptive phenomenology, were determined by snowball sampling methods. Nine primary school teachers, varying in terms of education level, location of the school, level of teaching class, gender and seniority, participated in the study. Qualitative data obtained through interviews conducted via online methods were analyzed with the phenomenological data analysis approach. In accordance with the analyses, primary school teachers' experiences during the pandemic process and the meanings they attributed to these experiences created the themes of "Being Development Oriented", "Guidance", "Instructional Designer", "Being Solution Oriented", "Collaborative Process Management" and "Social Responsibility". It was cocluded that primary school teachers developed a digital literate identity during the pandemic process, provided social and educational guidance to parents and students, experienced new technology-oriented methods-techniques, and produced individual solutions to the problems they experienced in the process, showed more solidarity with their colleagues than in the past, and provided service to different parts of the society.