Abstract
In 2020, the emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic brought a drastic and sudden change in teaching practices, from the physical space of the classrooms to the virtual space of an e-environment. In this paper, through a qualitative analysis of 44 collected essays composed by Italian mathematics teachers from primary school to undergraduate level during the spring of 2020, we investigate how the Italian teachers perceived the changes due to the unexpected transition from a face-to-face setting to distance education. The analysis is carried out through a double theoretical lens, one concerning the whole didactic system where the knowledge at stake is mathematics and the other regarding affective aspects. The integration of the two theoretical perspectives allows us to identify key elements and their relations in the teachers’ narratives and to analyze how teachers have experienced and perceived the dramatic, drastic, and sudden change. The analysis shows the process going from the disruption of the educational setting to the teachers’ discovery of key aspects of the didactic system including the teacher’s roles, a reflection on mathematics and its teaching, and the attempt to reconstruct the didactic system in a new way.
Highlights
This study aims to explore how Italian mathematics teachers managed their teaching activities in the context of a total lockdown imposed as part of the government response to the COVID19 pandemic
At the end of March 2020, a month from the onset of total lockdown in Italy, when every face-to-face activity was suspended across the country, we distributed a call for essays among Italian teachers from various grade levels, since teachers of every level were involved in the shift to distance education
We look for sentences revealing more and different interactions and attention to the students. – The teacher moves towards the Mathematics The teacher tells about the need for a reflection on Mathematics with respect to the teaching/learning process
Summary
This study aims to explore how Italian mathematics teachers managed their teaching activities in the context of a total lockdown imposed as part of the government response to the COVID19 pandemic. Italy’s education systems did not constitute an exception to this norm: schools and universities were suddenly closed, and teachers and learners shifted from the usual face-to-face to distance education. The reorganization of didactics in the schools has not been structured. The responsibility of such reorganization has been in the charge of the didactic managers and the teachers. Each teacher or each institution created their own e-environment, choosing an online teaching platform with communication and collaboration facilities and eventually with software for specific domains. New teaching settings required the teachers to engage with new designs of their teaching processes, impacting on the affective aspects of such processes
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