AJE Feature | “Losing My Craft”: Teachers’ Relational Work with Students During a Pandemic by Jeremy Murphy

The full-length American Journal of Education article can be accessed here.

Months into the 2020-2021 school year, I asked Kendra what it was like meeting new rosters of students virtually. Like nearly all teachers I interviewed, she took issue with the question, claiming she had “not met” most of her students. Teaching remotely meant talking to muted boxes on a screen for hours each day—trying to reach students she could neither see nor hear—and wondering who was actually there, much less listening. Amid these alienating instructional conditions, Kendra likened the new teacher-student dynamic to an “emotionally abusive relationship”: 

You’re like: “Please pay attention to me! Please acknowledge me! Please love me! I’ll do anything to get a reaction from you!” And then you don’t get that…That rejection becomes normalized, and you accept it, and you just cope. And this is what people aren’t talking about with teachers…We become teachers because we get excited about engaging with students. That is what energizes us, and that is what keeps us going…So to not get any of that back, or just a miniscule amount of it, is so exhausting.

COVID-19’s effects on learning and teaching have been enormous. Studies highlight a clear association between remote and hybrid learning and widening achievement gaps (Goldhaber et al. 2022; Kuhfeld et al. 2022). Meanwhile, surveys of teachers have consistently depicted a profession beset by fatigue, stress, and dissatisfaction, raising grave questions about retention (Kush et al. 2022; Steiner and Woo 2021). But despite ever growing evidence charting of pandemic’s negative effects on students and teachers, scholars have seldom considered its effects on what links both parties: the teacher-student relationship.  

As Kendra’s quote demonstrates, this relationship matters enormously for teachers. It is a leading reason many pursue teaching at all (Lortie 1975; Nieto 2005). It is frequently tapped as a resource for both students’ and teachers’ success (Bryk and Schneider 2002; Johnson and Birkeland 2003). And more personally, close engagement with students affords teachers psychic rewards, helping them persist in a demanding profession (Bernstein-Yamashiro and Noam 2013; Rosenholtz 1989). COVID-19 upended this crucial relationship. In “‘Losing My Craft’: Teachers’ Relational Work with Students During a Pandemic,” an upcoming article in the American Journal of Education, I explore how this was the case, how teachers responded, and what an unprecedented chapter in American schooling has meant for teachers’ work in general. 

The article draws on multiple in-depth interviews with 33 teachers and three instructional coaches, all conducted remotely over two extraordinary school years (2020-2021 and 2021-2022). Participants came from three secondary schools in one urban district called the Iron City Public Schools (pseudonym). Located in a midsize city of 200,000 residents, ICPS serves 25,000 students, seventy-five percent of whom are low-income and seventy percent of whom are non-White. 

Interviews revealed how pandemic-induced instructional conditions dramatically limited teachers’ relationships with students and, therefore, their sense of success in the classroom and overall satisfaction. Participants found it enormously challenging to connect with students virtually. They widely contended that a district policy prohibiting them from requiring students to turn on their cameras during class further stymied their relational work in the remote context. Though several sympathized in theory with this policy’s equity-driven rationale, all vividly described its chilling effects in practice. Most students, they argued, remained invisible, muted, and only passively engaged, if they were engaged at all. Some participants’ called their hard-to-reach pupils “ghosts,” a descriptor emphasizing teachers’ profound estrangement from students in what is ordinarily deeply interpersonal work. Though participants’ teaching practices often creatively sought to recapture the reciprocity characteristic of their physical classrooms, the remote context tended to reduce teaching to a series of prompts to take a pulse—maneuvers designed to figure out who was actually out there and, better yet, who was listening. So, unable to see or hear students, participants groped their way toward certitudes, as if blindfolded. “Should I go over this once more? Should I just move on?” Bruce constantly wondered. “I just hope that I’m moving the needle in the right direction,” Joyce shrugged. “I don’t even know if I am.”

Some participants found ways to cope in these instructional conditions. They found moderate success holding one-on-one conferences with students outside of class. In these more intimate settings, explained David, students were “more likely to unmute themselves and talk…That’s the way I’ve been able to connect.” Erica went as far to say that she had “gotten to know students better” while remote than she ordinarily would: “Not being in the classroom together has forced me to communicate with students one-on-one, to check in.” A small number of teachers discussed learning impressive amounts about students simply through what they typed in Google Classroom’s chat feature. These teachers became like involved pen pals with students. By January 2021, Nora stated confidently, “I’m starting to see them as not just a name on the screen.”

But overall, study participants’ commitment to their work tended to diminish as teaching became less recognizable and interactions with students grew convoluted. Lacking reciprocity with students poses everyday instructional hurdles, but reciprocity also runs deeper than instruction. It sustains teachers. It is why many pursue teaching in the first place, and, like fuel, it affords teachers motivation to keep working on behalf of students. “When none of my kids are doing it,” confided Hannah, “it doesn’t really motivate me to put in a lot of effort.” “When you’re not getting anything back,” Shannon similarly reasoned, “it’s really hard to keep being enthusiastic about what you do.” Estranged from students and teaching’s relational aspects, many teachers grew estranged from their work more broadly. Failing to readily or consistently access the psychic rewards that accompany productive engagement with young people, they questioned teaching. Some teachers left their positions altogether. As her teaching grew progressively quieter and teacher-centered, Shannon solemnly confessed: “I feel like I’m losing my craft.”

With each new, complicated phase of pandemic schooling, participants hoped that teaching might again be recognizable—that, with the new instructional changes, they might fulfill teaching’s relational dimensions more successfully. These hopes, however, were frequently dampened. Interviews conducted after remote learning formally ended revealed new barriers to human connection that hybrid learning and in-person learning with safety precautions introduced. These second interviews also underscored remote learning’s long shadow, outlining the peculiar ways its instructional conditions continued shaping relations once teachers and students finally shared space again. As Zoe summed up in January 2022 and others echoed: “Nobody can undo what last year did to them, teachers included, and we’ve brought all of that with us.” Participants’ experiences highlighted how difficult teacher-student relationships can be to restore after they have been disrupted so severely and for so long.

“Losing My Craft” offers a needed, rare view of teachers’ everyday work lives during the pandemic. Uplifting teachers’ voices, it departs from existing scholarship on pandemic teaching which has frequently relied on large-scale survey data. It extends what we know about disruptions to classroom teaching in the time of COVID-19, contributes to the historical record, and raises implications for policymakers and administrators as they continue rebuilding and reorienting schools in the pandemic’s wake. But it also delivers insights that transcend the moment. Whereas research on teacher-student relationships has largely focused on teachers’ individual efforts with students, “Losing My Craft” showcases the powerful roles that instructional conditions can play in teachers’ essential relational work. While the conditions participants encountered may have been pandemic-specific, their close examination demonstrates that teachers’ relational work is always a contextually bounded activity, shaped not only by individual choices but also by instructional conditions frequently beyond the teacher’s control. The study additionally contributes to the field’s conceptual understanding of teacher-student relationships, deepening scholarship on what these connections mean for teachers and introducing the concept of estrangement to describe the problematic social distance between teachers and students that certain instructional contexts can foster—a distance which poses serious consequences for teachers’ attitudes about their work in general. 

References

Bernstein-Yamashiro, Beth, and Gil G. Noam. 2013. Teacher-Student Relationships: Toward Personalized Education: New Directions for Youth Development, Number 137. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Bryk, Anthony S., and Barbara Schneider. 2002. Trust in Schools: A Core Resource for Improvement. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

Goldhaber, Dan, Thomas J. Kane, Andrew McEachin, Emily Morton, Tyler Patterson, and Douglas O. Staiger. 2022. “The Consequences of Remote and Hybrid Instruction During the Pandemic.” Cambridge: Center for Education Policy Research, Harvard University.

Kuhfeld, Megan, James Soland, and Karyn Lewis. 2022. “Test Score Patterns Across Three COVID-19 Impacted School Years.” Educational Researcher 51: 500-506. 

Kush, Joseph M., Elena Badillo-Goicoechea, Rashelle J. Musci, and Elizabeth A. Stuart. 2022. “Teachers’ Mental Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic.” Educational Researcher 51: 593-597. 

Lortie, Dan C. 1975. Schoolteacher: A Sociological Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 

Nieto, Sonia. 2005. Why We Teach. New York: Teachers College Press.

Johnson, Susan Moore, and Sarah E. Birkeland. 2003. “Pursuing a ‘Sense of Success’: New Teachers Explain Their Career Decisions.” American Educational Research Journal 40: 581-617.

Rosenholtz, Susan J. 1989. Teachers’ Workplace: The Social Organization of Schools. New York: Teachers College Press.

Steiner, Elizabeth D., and Ashley Woo. 2021. “Job-Related Stress Threatens the Teacher Supply: Key Finding from the 2021 State of the US Teacher Survey.” RAND Corporation.