Teachers’ experiences and well-being in the context of protracted COVID-19 school closures: Insights from Kazakhstan

• In Event: Keeping pulse on education reform in Eurasia: insights from international datasets (ONLINE)

Proposal

The extensive school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic complicated the work of teachers and widened existing educational inequities globally. This paper explores Kazakhstani teachers’ perspectives and experiences of teaching during school closures. In Kazakhstan, measures of social isolation to contain the spread of COVID-19 disrupted schooling across the country for a protracted time. It is crucial to explore how teachers experienced the transition to remote distance learning and how the pandemic impacted their work and educational disadvantage to inform future policy and practice in education in a crisis context. A mixed-methods sequential exploratory design was used to answer three questions: i. What are teachers’ experiences of and perspectives on distance/online learning?; ii. How was teachers’ work-life balance affected by school closures?; and iii. How are teachers’ experiences differentiated across a range of markers of disadvantage? First, the perspectives of 30 teachers across three regions—Almaty region, Nur-Sultan and Shymkent—were explored using semi-structured interviews between December 2020 and February 2021. The findings of the qualitative data informed the development of a contextually relevant questionnaire administered online between June and September 2021. In total, 19,635 teachers representing all oblasts and cities in Kazakhstan completed the survey.

Findings suggest the transition to emergency remote teaching widened inequities among teachers. In the long summer break in 2020, educational authorities took multiple measures to mitigate the digital divide and educational inequities and build the capacity of teachers to teach effectively online. Nevertheless, female teachers experienced greater challenges due to family obligations than male teachers. Significant associations were found in school location and internet access and usage of e-platforms, indicating rural schools were more disadvantaged. Rural schoolteachers were less confident and encountered more challenges in teaching online. Rural teachers were less likely to support their students’ different learning needs and they disagreed more about the efficiencies of online platforms and improving their proficiencies of online teaching. They disagreed more about online education improved student engagement, learning and learning motivation, and students’ time management and digital literacy skills. Multiple regression analyses indicated that gender, age, the school’s medium of instruction, location (rural vs. urban) and family income were all significant predictors of teachers’ perceptions of their work-life balance. These findings resonate with and further contribute to the emerging scholarly literature on equal access to education in the pandemic context. The paper offers responsive policy strategies for post-COVID support to teachers and schools.

Authors

• Zhadyra Makhmetova, Nazarbayev University Graduate School of Education

• Naureen Durrani, Nazarbayev Univeity