"I Can't Do Both": Parenting, Policy, and Instructional Practice During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Identifying and Navigating the Curriculum and Instructional Equity Fault Lines of the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

This paper explores the tensions between home and work life by examining the experience of K12 teaching with school age children at home during COVID-19. Specifically, it analyzes the intersection of parenting, district policy, and teacher’s instructional practice to better understand how district policy intervened in this crisis situation and how teachers responded.

Nearly half of America’s teachers have school aged children at home (Ingersoll, Merrill, Stuckey, & Collins, 2018). And while teaching work has long been considered compatible with the demands of being a working parent (Lortie, 1975), this compatibility assumes the spatial division of home and work. This division was ruptured by the move to remote teaching and distance learning. Initial reports of post shut-down teaching offer a complicated picture of teachers working longer hours and experiencing high degrees of stress and overwork (Gewertz, 2020) but also delivering less content (Hamilton et al, 2020). Early commentary suggests this work intensification resulted in part from the insufficient support for the transition to online (Herold, 2020) and that many were also contending with their own school age children’s transition to distance learning (Barnum, 2020).

District responses to these working conditions were variable. In some cases, unions negotiated on behalf of teachers redefining what constitutes a work-day and recognizing the demands of working parents but in other cases, districts lacked clear policy to guide teachers (Sawchuck, 2020). Teachers report variable challenges and support based on school context (elementary vs. secondary teachers), geography (suburban vs. urban vs. rural) and student population (high vs low poverty; high minoritized populations vs. mostly White) (Hamilton, Kaufman, & Diliberit, 2020). But early reports of pandemic teaching do not address the added complexity of teaching with school age children at home.

Analysis of 60 teacher interviews, and a survey of 700 teachers, reveal four intersecting themes. Teachers report struggling particularly with 1) blurring of the parenting and professional sphere, 2) physical and emotional exhaustion and, 3) decreased sense of self efficacy in both parenting and teaching, and 4) district policies that constrained and directed parenting teachers’ options around instructional practice and in determining the site of their children’s schooling and their own teaching.

In raising these issues, teachers are highlighting the lived experience of a transboundary crisis (Quarantelli, 2018) that ruptured the divide between work and family life and disrupted the systems supporting work, namely; childcare, physical workplace, work-free homes. Though teachers have long brought work home with them, they were also able to clearly delineate work and family spaces and prioritize differently in each. COVID-19 spilled the two spheres into one another resulting in increased stressors in both roles and diminished capacity to accomplish either. An intervening variable was the presence or absence of district policy (workplace) or additional supports (home life) for navigating these conditions.

Authors

• Alisun Thompson, Lewis & Clark College

• Lina Darwich, Lewis & Clark College

• Iris Hinds Weaver, Santa Cruz City Schools