Teacher insecurity and state protections: A comparative case study of Colombia and Ecuador

• In Event: Prioritizing Teachers in Fragile and Crisis Contexts: Contextually-Grounded Approaches to Understanding Teacher Well-being in a Digital Age - Part 1

Proposal

Scholarship has long emphasized the important roles that teachers play, as well as the difficult conditions in which they labor, in situations of conflict and crisis. An important aspect of teaching conditions that merits careful attention is teacher insecurity. This includes the diverse ways in which teachers experience and navigate situations of personal risk and harm while exercising their roles as educators. Past research has shown that teachers can experience attacks from armed groups in situations of conflict (Novelli, 2009; GCPEA, 2020), violence from their students (Reddy et al, 2018; Longobardi, et al, 2019), and the indirect effects of community exposure to criminal violence (Colin, 2023). These experiences carry implications for education access and quality as they contribute to teacher turnover, affect student-teacher relations, motivate educational exclusion, and gravely affect teacher well-being.
In recent years, scholars in the field of Education in Conflict and Crisis have highlighted the imperative of building evidence regarding the conditions and strategies for safeguarding teacher well-being in crisis and conflict-affected contexts (Falk et al, 2019). Within this emergent literature, while teacher insecurity is understood to be a priority, there is as yet limited conceptual and empirical analysis regarding the parameters and implications of this phenomenon. Furthermore, as recent research has highlighted (Rodríguez-Gómez and Bermeo, 2020; Colin, 2022), there is a need to further analyze how contemporary forms of conflict and insecurity shape teacher experiences.
Drawing on a comparative case study of teacher experiences in Colombia and Ecuador, this paper explores how teachers describe the processes of threat they experience from armed actors and how their respective education systems protect them and their teaching role. The study draws attention to the grievous symbiosis between criminal governance and fragmented ineffectual education bureaucracies that position teachers precariously, contributing to conditions of risk and shifting the burden of addressing threats onto teachers and school communities.

Author

• Maria Jose Bermeo, Universidad de Los Andes