Examining teachers’ well-being during the pandemic: a mixed methods study on teachers’ psychological, emotional and identity responses to online education

This mixed methods study investigates teachers’ well-being in online education by looking at their linguistic and professional identity construction in the context of offline and online education. Teachers’ identity construction in online education sheds light on their virtual identities (Kramsch 2009) as well as their emotional and psychological responses (Fekete 2020a, 2020b) to online education. The paper seeks to prove that identity construction is shaped by the language spoken by the person, the context of the person, and other individual differences of the person. Therefore, the author proposes that identity construction should be envisaged as a complex dynamic system of the person’s individual differences that responds to changes in the levels of the system as well as environmental stimuli. Twenty-six teachers from eight countries participated in the research by completing a sentence completion task administered online. The large textual datasets were analyzed using qualitative content analysis that pointed out emerging themes. Then, descriptive statistics was employed to detect trends and frequencies, shining light on changes in the participants’ emotions and identity construction in the various contexts. The findings point out that offline and online education shape teachers’ identity construction as well as their psychological and emotional responses very differently. The results also pinpoint the difficulties teachers were faced with in online education and how these difficulties shaped their psychological, emotional and identity responses to the novel circumstances of their profession. / Key words: linguistic identity, professional identity, virtual identity, online education, teachers, emotions, complex dynamic systems, individual differences