„COVID bjargaði mér“: störf kennara í fyrstu bylgju heimsfaraldurs

The World Health Organization announced the COVID-19 outbreak as a pandemic
in early March 2020. COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by a newly discovered
coronavirus. The first cases of COVID-19 were confirmed in Iceland in late February
and the Government announced various measures to control the spread of the virus by
enacting a ban on larger gatherings and introducing rules on social distancing which
resulted in disruption of school activities when teachers were forced to change their
teaching practices. Although Icelandic compulsory school students were able to attend
school part-time the everyday school life was disrupted. Inclusive education is the official
education policy in Iceland and every student should have equal study opportunities
and access to appropriate educational activities (Mennta- og menningarmálaráðuneyti
[Ministry of Education, Science and Culture], 2011). This article reports on a qualitative
research project carried out among fourteen middle school teachers and explores their
experiences of teaching in inclusive education settings, particularly during the COVID-19
pandemic. The interviews were taken during the period of June – September 2020. In
this article we adopt Michel Foucault’s (1975) ideas on governmentality to explain how
teachers and everyday school life are monitored and controlled. Governmentality refers
to the study of power where the subject is a willing participant in being governed and
takes part in self-governing of their conduct. Foucault (1975) uses Bentham’s idea of the
panopticon as a model for external surveillance; the subjects do not know if anyone is in the
panopticon and therefore are unaware as to whether they are being monitored. Foucault
further developed the idea of the panopticon and introduced the term panopticism to
describe internal surveillance when the gaze of the watchman is internalized by the
subject who takes on self-monitoring. The research findings suggest that the participants
had both positive and negative experiences of teaching middle-school children during
the COVID-19 pandemic. All teachers claimed they experienced more freedom and
more trust. Before the pandemic most had experienced negative attitudes from the
media and the public, consistently shaming teachers and blaming for failing PISA results
and claiming they have too much holiday and lack basic training. Also, the teachers
had experienced lack of understanding and support from school administrators when
facing difficulties teaching in inclusive settings. They claimed that their classes were
too big, they lacked day-to-day support from special educators, time for preparation was
inadequate, as was overall support in dealing with difficult teacher-parent relationships.
Many teachers faced additional pressure from external experts and pet-projects taken
on by school administrators, often with the purpose of dealing with failing results from
PISA or other standardized tests. There was a discursive shift during the pandemic.
Instead of shaming teachers, they became “essential workers” and were placed at the
frontline alongside healthcare professionals. Suddenly they were trusted to plan and
carry out their teaching without systematic monitoring. All the teachers claimed that
working with their students in smaller groups made it possible to provide individualized
support and that COVID-19 had proven the importance of small numbered classes in
inclusive settings. However, the teachers also described how COVID-19 with online and
distance learning had exposed the different home situations of Icelandic students, a topic
which has been taboo in Icelandic society. There have been claims that the digital gap
in Iceland is almost non-existent. The findings, however, suggest that access to digital
technology has been overestimated by the Icelandic school system. The teachers, from
all over Iceland, described homes that did not have access to the internet, did not own
computers or tablets and did not have basic computer skills to be able to support younger
students. Also, the schools were not all ready for online teaching. Some of the teachers
described how the internet connection was poor in their schools, stating that there were
not enough computers for teachers and students and lack of computer skills among
teachers. The teachers also told stories about families who were shielding against the disease and their children never came to schools, but some students never came to class
during the assembly ban. Reasons were related to health and language barriers, but also
to social difficulties and neglect. Finally, the teachers declared that in some sense they
were relieved to get a break from meetings with parents and external specialists which
raises the question how these students with special education needs experienced these
changes during the pandemic; this needs additional exploration with further research.
The panopticon or the external monitoring of the school system produces a discourse
of responsibility, where teachers are responsible for the measured failings of the school
system and individual students. The panopticon appears to have broken down during the
pandemic which allowed teachers more freedom and caused a discursive shift away from
responsibility towards trust. Further research is required soon to determine whether this
discursive shift will be sustained after the pandemic.