Vol. 15, No. 2 (2021), pp. 117–132 https://doi.org/10.22329/jtl.v15i2.6725
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Building a Plane While Flying: Crisis Policy Enactment During COVID-19 in Alberta Secondary Schools
Beyhan Farhadi York University
Sue Winton York University
Abstract
We use the metaphor of building a plane while flying to describe the enactment of educational policies by teachers during COVID-19 and the impact of these policies on their ability to meet the needs of their students. Drawing from a series of three one-hour focus groups with seven teachers in Alberta, we apply critical policy analysis to describe the transition of public schools to pandemic education, especially in urban centers. This paper will begin by reviewing the dynamic policy context of school closures and reentry strategies and proceed to outline the diverse ways school boards interpreted guidelines from the Ministry of Education. We discuss the frustration with and variation of policy enactment during the pandemic, especially with respect to priorities and barriers to addressing student wellbeing and access to educational and social supports. Finally, we describe the consequences of teaching through crisis as it emerges in a political context that has failed to respond to educator’s professional needs.
While education during crisis has long taken place in contexts of natural disasters, war, and the outbreak of communicable diseases, the scale of the still-unfolding coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has affected schooling in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Closing schools has been part of a broader public health response to COVID-19 across Canada that also includes partial business shut downs, directives to stay at home, restrictions on air travel, and safety plans for the workplace. School closures that forced teaching and learning online at unprecedented speeds raised many questions about the impacts of these moves on educators, students, and social inequalities.
Crises are characterized by uncertainty, threat, and urgency (Boin, Hart, & Kuipers, 2018).
They test people’s ability to solve problems and challenge leaders to bring life “back to normal.”
Crisis researchers Arjen Boin and Paul 't Hart (2003) describe the “dynamic and chaotic processes”
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(p. 545) that characterize crisis and the contradiction between an economic imperative of growth on one hand and expectations for public safety, preventative measures, and learning required for effective leadership on the other. The title of this paper, “Building a Plane While Flying,” describes the impact of these contradictions on teachers, who interpret and translate policy directives in their work. As one participant in our study explains:
SL: The sentence that we've heard a lot lately has been “we're building the aircraft as we're flying it.” This analogy of, we don't really know what's going to happen but we're going to start up school anyways and just see how it goes, and develop policy as we go. Good thing that they're working with teachers, because we've figured it out.
Crisis management requires sense making of “vague, ambivalent, and contradictory signals” as well as coordination across organizations and agencies who self-organize to respond to their local circumstances (Boin et al., 2018, pp. 30–32). This paper reports findings from our study of how educators in Alberta, Canada, responded to the COVID-19 crisis. It aims to document teachers’ experiences and thoughts about the Alberta government’s and school districts’ policy responses and to highlight how teachers interpreted and translated policy directives during this crisis. Our findings show that teachers negotiated competing external policy directives and their own beliefs, knowledge, health, and working conditions as they enacted policy and created
“alternate orderings” (Fenwick, 2010, p. 126) in response to the contextual dimensions that varied considerably during crisis.
We begin this article with a brief introduction to how education is organized in Alberta and then discuss the theory of policy enactment that grounded our research. Next, we present our study’s methodology before turning to our findings. Finally, we discuss the contributions of our study to developing understanding of the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on teachers in general and educators’ policy enactment during crisis in particular.
Education in Alberta
With nearly 4.5 million people, Alberta is Canada’s fourth most populated province. Its provincial government—like all provincial and territorial governments in Canada—is responsible for governing education for its residents. It fully funds public and charter schools and partially funds some private schools. Students normally attend school from kindergarten to Grade 12 and write provincial diploma exams in select Grade 12 courses.
Like many others around the world, governments across Canada have introduced educational policies grounded in neoliberal ideals over the past few decades (Bocking, 2020;
Grimmet, 2018; Winton & Milani, 2017). These policies encourage the reorganization of education to reflect the values and practices of the private sector. Reforms include the creation of quasi- markets in education through school choice policies, standardized curriculum and reporting, participation in international assessments, and per pupil funding models. Compared to other provinces in Canada, Alberta has arguably most enthusiastically embraced these and other neoliberal reforms. Many of them were introduced in the 1990s by the Provincial Conservative government under Ralph Klein. Alberta is the only province with charter schools, introduced modestly in 1994 (Bill 19) but set to expand under the Choice in Education Act (Bill 15), passed in June 2020, after the limits on the number of charter schools were removed through amendments to the Education Act (Riep, 2020). These recent reforms, introduced under the current United
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Conservative Party (UCP) government, “reflect … the influence of neoconservative and neoliberal ideologies in education” in Alberta (Mindzak, 2020).
Teachers’ Policy Enactment
Our critical policy analysis views teachers as policymakers (Ozga, 2000) and draws on Ball et al.’s (2012) theory of policy enactment in schools. This theory views policy as a dynamic, “creative process of interpretation and recontextualization” (p. 3). It differs from traditional, rational theories that understand policy as an instrumental, linear process wherein governments or other authoritative bodies (e.g., school districts) make a decision that is then implemented by different groups of individuals, such as teachers and administrators. Instead, policy enactment theory recognizes that policies are constantly remade by the people responsible for translating them “from text to action and the abstractions of policy ideas into contextualized practices” (Ball et al., 2012, p. 3).
While acknowledging educators’ agency in interpreting and translating directives in ways that make sense for their school, policy enactment theory explains that a school’s context impacts these processes. Specifically, a school’s situated context, professional culture, material context, and external context influence policy enactment. The situated context of a school includes its history, location, student demographics, and institutional narratives. Its professional culture includes teachers’ attitudes, values, and outlooks, as well as where and with whom they work in the school. A school’s material context includes its staffing, physical buildings, infrastructure, and budgets. Finally, a school’s external context includes policies and discourses beyond the school, including school district policies, its reputation and relationships with other schools, and broader cultural, economic, and political contexts. Variations in the dimensions of local context in combination with the external context help explain why people in similar-seeming schools enact the same policy differently.
Importantly, Ball et al.’s theory is based on their case studies of four secondary schools during ordinary (i.e., non-crisis) times when a school’s contexts, while never static, would be unlikely to change as rapidly as the unfolding of the COVID-19 pandemic. Furthermore, Ball et al. focused on schools as their unit of investigation, not teachers. When we initiated our study, we wondered if a focus on teachers might reveal influences on policy enactment not captured in Ball et al.’s institutional focus. To be fair, they did not claim to have identified every contextual factor in their theory; instead, they offered it as “a heuristic device that is intended to stimulate interest and to provoke questions about the circumstances that influence policy enactments in ‘real’
schools” (p. 41). We took up Ball et al.’s (2012) offer in our study.
In addition to policy contexts, the nature of the policy itself also impacts enactment. While
“[p]olicies rarely tell you exactly what to do,” some offer more room for interpretation than others (Ball et al., 2012, p. 3). “[D]isciplinary policies,” such as standardized testing, provide little space for teachers’ creative responses and produce a “primarily passive policy subject” (Ball et al., 2011, p. 612). This is problematic since, as Bocking (2020) explains, teachers must be able to exercise professional autonomy when interpreting policy in order to meet students’ needs. Contemporary neoliberal policies in education, such as those adopted by Alberta’s government that promote the values and practices of the private sector and replace policies grounded in commitments to equality and the intrinsic value of education, have placed new constraints on teachers’ ability to control their work. Nevertheless, opportunities to exercise discretion when enacting—and resisting—
policies remain (Ball & Olmedo, 2013; Bocking, 2020).
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This article discusses findings from our case study of teachers’ policy enactment in Alberta, Canada, one of two cases in our comparative policy study (Ontario, Canada, is the other case). We designed our research following Bartlett and Vavrus’s (2016) comparative case study approach.
Grounded in a critical policy orientation, this approach combines traditional notions of comparing phenomena (i.e., understanding and explaining similarities and differences) with added attention to tracing the phenomena across and through various sites as they unfold over time. To accomplish this task, the comparative case study approach involves comparing cases across three axes:
horizontal, vertical, and transversal. Comparison on the horizontal axis involves contrasting one case with others on the same scale. Comparison on the vertical axis involves comparing international, national, provincial, and local influences on each case. Comparison on the transversal axis involves comparing within and across the cases over time.
For each case, data was collected from four sources: administrators, teachers, news media, and texts produced by the Alberta and Ontario governments, Canada’s federal government, and school boards in Alberta and Ontario. All articles and texts were published between March 13, 2020, and February 28, 2021. In this article, we focus on what we learned from a series of three focus group interviews with seven secondary school teachers in Alberta. The seven participants worked in four public school districts in Alberta, two of which are in the most populated and diverse cities in the province. Participants’ teaching subject areas included chemistry, special education, social science, English, and drama. Their online teaching experiences varied from none at all to using online platforms to post class assignments and other learning materials. One teacher taught in an alternative school. The interviews were held using open-source videoconferencing software in July and November 2020 and February 2021.
Our interview questions were guided by our interests in policy enactment, equity, and online learning, with the objective of learning about teachers’ decision-making during COVID-19.
Our use of focus groups, a qualitative method, interrupts common perceptions of policy as a goal- oriented process of rational, individual behavior with outcomes that can be evaluated objectively (Colebatch, 2009). Through the focus groups, we explored the dynamics of policy during a crisis, where exercising professional judgement carries unknown risks as teachers enact new policies in unfamiliar and highly stressful circumstances.
Using an inductive approach, we thematically coded and categorized the interviews, paying close attention to the contextual factors teachers identified as influences on their policy interpretations and practices. We cross-referenced interviews with provincial legislation and policy, news releases and reports detailing school closures and the impact of COVID-19 across the province, board specific plans and directives, and reports by professional organizations such as teacher unions, public health units, and advocacy groups.
Findings and Discussion
Before the pandemic struck, disruptions in public education in Alberta were well underway. The Alberta United Conservative Party removed the word “public” from all school boards to “simplify the naming conventions,” leaving many suspicious that the motive was exclusively ideological (Fieber, 2019). On February 27, 2020, Alberta’s UCP government tabled its provincial budget in the legislature (Government of Alberta, 2020a) while outside thousands protested cuts targeting the public sector (CBC News, 2020a). According to an analysis by McIntosh and Hussey (2020) at the Parkland Institute, a non-partisan research centre housed at the University of Alberta, the
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budget included a 3% cut to public sector job compensation, the private provisioning of health care, and a cumulative 7% reduction in the K–12 education budget (factoring the consumer price index and population growth) accompanied by marginal increases to private school funding. They noted school boards were expected to draw from their reserves to meet operating expenses as enrolment climbed.
It is in the context of on-going neoliberal reform in Alberta that we explored teachers’
policy enactment from March 2020 to February 2021. We begin the discussion of our findings with an overview of key government and school board announcements in evolving external context within this time frame. As Ball et al. (2012) emphasize, context is an “active force” in policy enactment, not simply the background upon which policy activity takes place (p. 24). This point is particularly evident in our data as the evolving COVID-19 crisis resulted in on-going adjustments to public health measures, which in turn meant dynamic education policymaking by actors in Alberta’s government, school boards, schools, and classrooms.
A dynamic external context
The Alberta government closed schools on March 15, 2020, (Government of Alberta, 2020a) in response to the growing number of cases of COVID-19 in Alberta. Education Minister Adrian LaGrange told Albertans that education would “look different from jurisdiction to jurisdiction,” noting that “[w]e have approximately 780,000 students across this province that will be learning in very different manners” (CBC News, 2020b, para. 18). On March 20, 2020, the government released provincial guidelines on “Continuing Student Learning” (Government of Alberta, 2020c). The guidelines primarily addressed the form and content of education during closures as well as assessment. They directed school boards to deliver instruction online, with accommodations for students who needed paper packages and phone check-ins. All online instruction was to be delivered by teachers to students they formerly taught face-to-face in their home schools.
Teachers were directed to “prioritize remaining [curricular] outcomes [that have not yet been covered] based on what is manageable for students working from home” (Government of Alberta, 2020c, para. 5). The guidelines also outlined hours of content delivery, ranging from five hours a week for students in kindergarten to Grade 3 to three hours of work per course, per week, for Grades 10–12. Provincial assessments, normally written by students in Grades 6 and 9, were cancelled. So, too, were Grade 12 diploma exams. Teachers were given responsibility for assessing progress and assigning a final grade, while school authorities were responsible for deciding “how assessment will be determined in this unique circumstance” (Government of Alberta, 2020c, para.
16).
As expected, school boards varied in how they enacted the government’s directives. In the case of assessment, for example, the Calgary Board of Education stated that final grades for courses that continued online after March 15, 2020, could not drop below “interim percentage grades, but may increase, based on demonstrations of further learning” (Calgary Board of Education, 2020b, para. 13). In contrast, teachers in Edmonton Public Schools were advised to
“determine final grades based on the best interests of the student” based on evidence of learning collected before and after March 14 (Edmonton Public Schools, 2020b, para. 6). In terms of continuing learning, boards varied in terms of the timing and composition of delivery, from distance to synchronous and asynchronous, with varying levels of teacher involvement (Government of Alberta, 2021).
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On March 28, the UCP government announced that they would redirect $128 million from the K–12 education budget to their COVID response (CBC News, 2020b). As a result, the Calgary Board of Education was forced to issue 1900 temporary layoff notices (Calgary Board of Education, 2020a) while Edmonton Public Schools laid off 1868 permanent and temporary staff, including administrative and educational assistants, library support, and food services workers (Edmonton Public Schools, 2020a; Bench 2020a). The cuts were widely cited as heartless and cruel and revealed that the provincial government believed online learning required neither resources nor support (Bennett, 2020).
In anticipation of September, the Minister of Education announced that students could return to in-person classrooms in accordance with public health protocols. However, school boards would also provide an option for families who would prefer their children to learn online. Again, school boards’ plans differed. The Calgary Board of Education, for instance, was on a semestered system and did not permit families to switch from in-person instruction to online learning during the 2020–2021 school year, but it did allow students learning online to return to school in-person if they provided notice by January. In contrast, the Edmonton Public School Board operated under a quarterly system and provided the option to switch after every quarter, four times a year. The take up of the option to learn online varied as well: about 30% of students in Edmonton compared to 16% of students in Calgary (Bench, 2020a; CBC News, 2020c). In terms of assessment, the Ministry of Education originally announced that provincial assessments and diploma exams would be held as usual but later said students could choose whether to write diploma exams and that school boards would determine whether students would write provincial achievement tests.
As cases of COVID-19 increased through the fall, the government announced that in- person learning would be suspended for most students in Grades 7–12 beginning November 30 and that all students would learn at home following the winter break until January 11, 2021. We turn now to key ideas expressed by our participants about their experiences enacting policy during the COVID-19 crisis.
Frustration, variation, and policy enactment
While cognizant of the need for the government and school boards to respond to the evolving public health situation, the teachers in our study reported feeling frustrated by inconsistent messages from the Ministry of Education and their school boards.
NK: Our advice on how to do stuff changed throughout, which, I mean, I get it, but it was super frustrating.
PL: In [my board], when it first came out it said, “Oh yeah, kids can still fail, keep doing it as normal.” And then about beginning of June, all of a sudden, our Board gave us these, like, maybe it was four or five scenarios, I can't even remember, but it was like, if before March 15 the student was still was passing, we weren't allowed to fail them. But then, you had to go back and choose their mark. And there were all these different conditions, so it was super frustrating.
The teachers, like those quoted below, also expressed frustration with differences between boards, between schools in a district, and between teachers in a school.
ML: There was a lot of variation in how that initial Board policy was interpreted by schools—and, specifically directives within schools, within our district—even though
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there was this overall provincial mandate that came out about it. So, I found that really frustrating.
SL: We figured it out for the most part, at least in my school. I've heard from teachers around the board that there’s tremendous variation in policy between schools. The ministry effectively has downloaded responsibility to school authorities, and then school authorities have downloaded that onto schools, at least my board. And so, a lot of local decision making is happening.
KH: Policy has been created, and it’s got all of these weird gaps in it. And then that got downloaded to school districts. I'm a specialist teacher, and then that got downloaded to me. And so, I worked through the summer creating a food studies policy, working off of restaurant policy as restaurants reopened, to kind of see where we might fit.… It isn’t exactly what Alberta Health Services would like, but we can’t seem to find the meeting point there. High school Food Studies teachers in [one district] are not allowed to cook.
They're teaching but the kids aren't cooking. We're cooking up in [our district]. I've got one section of teachers in [another district where] the kids can cook but they can't eat what they make. So, they have to throw their food away as like a toddler. Oh, I know, this just makes me want to die.
As she discusses in the quote above, KH created her own policy that referenced the provincial and school board school re-entry documents as well as updated policies guiding opening for restaurants, cafes, pubs, and bars. It provided specific protocols for the distribution and use of ingredients and equipment, as well as for eating and managing leftovers. Her solution involved creative negotiation of competing directives in order to fit her circumstances and those of her students and colleagues.
In addition, teachers strongly opposed the governments’ and school boards’ policy priorities over the year. In March 2020, when schools first closed, teachers felt the government’s direction to award final grades and to continue (rather than pause) learning was inappropriate. Our participants thought that students’ well-being, including access to food and mental health supports, should instead be the priorities, and teachers, like those quoted below, privileged these issues:
CD: In terms of meeting the needs of the students … the beginning was just getting contact,
“Are you okay? Do you need a Chromebook? Do you need food?” And like making those rounds and dropping those things off and, and doing all that kind of stuff.
ML: I mean, even when, when schools first closed, I was directed to not even get in touch with my students, not even send them email to be like, it’s … like, just a company email,
‘cause we want to wait for the district’s messaging to come out and we’ll use that in our communication with students and parents, right. So not even just a supportive message to students to be like, you know, that wasn’t even allowed. I know a lot of teachers did it. I did it as well because like we’re humans and we need to connect with our, our students we care about.
SL: I checked out of what I was being asked to do by the school and by the Board and I took care of my students the way I know I had to…. I'm the teacher of these kids. And I know every single one of them. I didn't think that what I was being asked to do was appropriate, and so I didn't do it.
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KH described the experience during the first school closures as “leaping into the deep end,”
especially as she struggled to support students she served through nutrition and snack programs, which she managed outside her classroom. Efforts she and her colleagues made to check in with students through phone calls, emails, and home visits reflect the ways teachers filled gaps between directives without the resources required to support students, who were confronting social inequities schools have long tried to mitigate.
Teachers we spoke with also felt it was inappropriate to expect students to continue learning given that it was such an uneven experience. Not all students had access to necessary learning materials or supports. Some had to wait weeks for devices they could use to connect virtually with teachers (Ferguson, 2020), and not all students knew how to use them once they arrived. Kids in rural and remote communities, which have greater barriers to accessing broadband services (Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission, 2019), used paper packages if they wanted to continue learning. NK explained: “We ended up having students come in and get paper copies of work, hard copies of work. Because they simply could not do the technology part.… Easily 50% of our students opted out of technology and went to hard copy.”
While participants shared that students without access to an internet-connected device and/or a quiet space to learn in a household that can support their needs struggled, they expressed that even some students with these resources confronted challenges. SL describes the negative impact of closures, compounded by the government’s decision to redirect education funding to support other pandemic-related costs, on some of his students:
SL: The kind of students we typically worry about the least [i.e., high achievers, with privilege] ended up being some of my students who were affected the most. When tragedy did strike in their lives, they just didn't have the support networks to deal with it. Here in Alberta, we had all of our support staff cut. We were lucky enough at [my school] to have a school psychologist half-time, and they were cut. And literally I got a referral from this one kid who's having a really, really bad time, to the psychologist to do phone therapy … but the day after I got that set up, they were laid off. It was, yeah, really, really, really frustrating.
Teachers’ feelings of frustration about Ministry and district priorities carried through to the new school year when provincial assessments and district diploma exams were reinstated as part of what participants characterized as a “business as usual” approach, an approach that narrowed teachers’ ability to adjust academic demands in response to their students’ other needs.
CD: [Compared to the flexibility of Spring 2020], my district really had an emphasis on rigor and business as usual… I understand where they're coming from but in practice, when a lot of my colleagues and myself heard the term “business as usual,” it was a punch in the gut in terms of what we're trying to do [compared to what] the admin or district was trying to put forward. Nothing is usual or normal about this entire school year.
PL: So, for me business, as usual, was asking the students right off the bat, like, “Is thinking about writing the diploma [exam] that you have to decide right now, you can decide very last minute, but I need to have some vague idea,” and there was two out of my 60 kids, I guess there was two that were 100% sure. And I think the reasons were because of some scholarships that they had to have so many diplomas written. So, when you have two kids writing a really academic diploma—
and I've taught this diploma course for a while now—you can't take your foot off the gas….
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Interviewer: So, the diploma, specifically, the exam, had constrained your flexibility is what I'm hearing?
PL: Yeah, because there was no option of maybe if I didn't finish, I can, you know, you think about what you could possibly leave out, but there was no, I had to finish everything and prepare them for the diploma…
SL: Yeah, I mean, I had two diploma courses too. But I took a completely different stance, and it didn't even occur to me that any of them, I really hope none of them are in the same situation as your kids because I've literally just abandoned the diploma…
One teacher, CD, worried that going ahead with assessments would exacerbate existing inequities in schools. She explained:
CD: I was really worried about assessment policies being put in place that would further—
in my view—widen the gap … achievement gap between students.… I guess a lot of my concern and stress and anxiety came around equity, because there’s a lot of, um, you know, business-as-usual approach by folks who are making decisions. And that business- as-usual approach, in the middle of a crisis, to me, was only going to hurt … create more inequity within our system. And so, I was really concerned about that.
Trustees at the Edmonton Public School District were also worried and raised concerns with the Ministry of Education in October 2020 about diploma exams, not only citing logistical issues (with 30% of students online) but also challenging the business-as-usual approach. In presenting their motion to suspend the exams, Trustee Shelagh Dunn reportedly said, “I believe it's unhealthy to act as if things are normal when they aren't… It could be a recipe for fatigue, exhaustion and burn out” (Riebe, 2020, para. 5). Soon after, the Minister of Education announced that diploma exams would be optional for 2020–2021, moving against recommendations to suspend the tests altogether given the stressors on both students and staff.
Teachers’ concerns about fairness also impacted their practices. Our participants talked about fairness in terms of ensuring no students were penalized by circumstances beyond their control alongside their concerns about inequities between students.
KH: Knowing the kids that come to my class—the ones that come hungry, the ones that come marginalized, the ones that come with struggles, it’s a mountain they climb before they come to school—I was like, “Yeah. Whatever. Let’s just give them the credits, because it’s not their fault. This isn’t their fault.”
NK: The mental health issues that our students were dealing with, as well as just economic issues, you know, they had so much on their plates. I wasn’t going to … I wasn’t going to penalize people.… You know what, I just juggled what I believe was best for those students.
CD: I had to make decisions in my own classroom that were very different than my department and my school and even my district, in order to do what I thought was the most equitable thing.
When schools closed in March 2020 and schooling was supposed to take place virtually, teachers’ knowledge of online tools as well as features of the tools themselves (e.g., chat functions,
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platform stability) affected how they carried out mandates to keep learning going. Many described facing a “learning curve” as they tried to figure out how to teach online. VS and KH both had contrasting experiences, shaped by graduate degrees in Learning and Educational Technology:
VS: I have a Master’s degree in Learning and Technology and I’m all about online technology, but I didn’t enjoy the way it went [in the Spring]. I think I’d be able to do it better this time [in the Fall].
KH: I have always taught using Google Classroom as a resource…. So, in some ways that wasn’t an issue for me. I’m working on my Master’s in Educational Technology, so this was … I was like, “Woo hoo! Great times.”
Teachers also identified issues related to their personal circumstances that affected how they navigated policy. Some of these concerns were directly related to their working conditions, such as worries about having no place to teach from at home when required and, conversely, worries about bringing the virus home to family members when working in schools. KH, for example, described how her circumstances impacted decision-making:
KH: There's always that, that navigating between the province says this, the school district says this, and what actually works for the teacher. So, like I live in an open concept house, I have senior parents that live with me. And that I don't have an office with doors. I'm at a landing at the top of the stairs. And so yeah [sarcastically] it's like we can do this, right. But the directive was, we cannot go into school and I thought, I have an outside door, I can go from the parking lot into my classroom, and teach there. So, I ended up doing that, I ignored that directive, because it wasn't making sense for me and my family.
Managing crisis requires flexibility, improvisation, and rule-breaking (Boin et al., 2018, p.
32). The teachers we spoke with exhibited these behaviours and attributes as they enacted various Ministry and district policies. Doing so was not always easy, however. As mentioned above, the decision to make diploma exams optional was a Ministry policy that narrowed teachers’ ability to adjust academic expectations. But teachers faced other challenges as well, although not all of them were affected similarly.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the amount of notice teachers had before beginning instruction, either remotely or in-person, impacted their policy decisions. Teachers with job security who could anticipate their course assignments in advance had time to prepare for the transition back to school in the fall. For example, KH, the food studies teacher quoted above, used the summer between school closure and re-opening to produce her own cooking policy. Teachers without secure positions, on the other hand, faced more difficulty, as CD observed:
I think the real challenge in our district from what I'm seeing comes from teachers who don't have the [full-time] contracts, teachers who are generally younger and are assigned more easily, I guess. And those are the teachers really working in a precarious situation where they don't know what their assignment is or where they're going to be until the first day of quarter. I know some teachers didn't get assigned to their online class until the second or third day of school. And so, there's been a lot of frustration on that end, for teachers.
VS for instance began the year as an occasional teacher and found a job at the end of September. He describes the stress of this precarity:
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We get no preps at all this year. So, we’re just teaching all the time. And there’s of course been a lot more asked of us in terms of following up as you normally would with special needs students and managing three-hour classes.… That’s starting to take a toll because it’s not like there’s a lot of downtime to get things done. And they’re starting to increase the demands on what is being done … and I’m just the new guy trying to sort of get a sense of what’s up and fit in and move along as best I can.
Participants also mentioned that the move back to remote learning in November was much smoother than in Spring 2020 because they had a few days’ notice, enabling them to better prepare for the switch.
Consequences of teaching through crisis: fatigue, burnout, and increased workloads
The extraordinary demands of teaching through the COVID-19 pandemic have taken a toll on teachers’ health. Our participants shared feelings of exhaustion arising from the exceptional amount of emotional labour required to address their own and students’ needs as well as increased workloads. These greater demands included learning to teach virtually or remotely, spending hours online, cleaning classrooms, switching between in-person and online or remote instruction, and, for some teachers in districts that moved to a quarter system, teaching all day with few breaks.
KH: And like people are super stressed. Right? So, it doesn't, especially now, take much to send people off over the edge.
ML: I'm seeing some of the calmest people now coming unhinged.
KH: Yes. Me as well. And I'm just like, and sometimes it's me, right? It's been a pretty good week but like my open-door policy to my colleagues [makes explosive noise]. I had to buy more emergency chocolate, I handed it out. I was like, “I don't have anything but chocolate chip.” They're like, “Don't you have cooking wine?” Oh, yeah, people are just super stressed. Some of it has to do with scheduling. Because it's still true. Assignments are changing every quarter. As we move students from in-person to online and parents are making choices—I will say the school district has gotten marginally better about deadlines.
So, it's not running right up until school starts. They learned from that in the Fall but it's still hard.
Other teachers spoke about feeling and observing “severe teacher burnout” and some predicted that teachers would leave the profession as a consequence.
Findings from research conducted throughout 2020 show that our participants were not alone in their feelings of fatigue. Based on data collected from 15,000 teachers in June 2020, the Canadian Teachers’ Federation (2020) reported that “the mental health of teachers was ‘severely endangered’ by stressors such as: excessive workload, lack of clear directions and planning, increased screen time, and social isolation” (Canadian Teachers’ Federation, 2020, p. 1). These problems appeared to worsen as time went on. In late November, after schools returned to in- person teaching and just before teaching moved back online for Grades 7–12, the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) reported that 92% of survey respondents (both teachers and school leaders) indicated they were experiencing fatigue, 91% reported feeling stress, and 62% said they were very concerned about teachers’ mental health. The survey also showed that 73% of teachers were “moderately or extremely concerned about student mental health” (ATA, 2020, p. 1).
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Contributions: Understanding Teachers’ Policy Enactment During Crisis
Our findings contribute to developing an understanding of the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on teachers in general and educators’ policy enactment during an ongoing crisis in particular. They highlight, in Ball et al.’s (2012) words, that “context is an ‘active’ force, it is not just a backdrop upon which schools have to operate” (p. 24). To state the obvious, the unfolding COVID-19 crisis created on-going changes to public health measures (e.g., stay at home orders, social distancing, mask mandates), which in turn led to constant education policymaking and remaking in all sites.
The teachers in our study expressed frustration with Alberta’s government and their school boards in part because policy directives were slow in coming and inconsistent. When policy decisions were announced, participants felt they inappropriately advocated a “business as usual” approach, especially with regard to continued learning and assessment. Instead, teachers felt students’ well- being, fairness to students, and teachers’ mental health should be prioritized. These beliefs played a key role in the ways teachers enacted Ministry and board policies.
Despite the extraordinary circumstances of COVID-19, these findings reflect previous research on teachers’ policy enactment in ordinary times. Tan (2017), for example, found that Singapore teachers’ knowledge, values, and beliefs about what they thought was best for students influenced how they interpreted critical thinking policy and translated it into their practice.
Teachers’ beliefs about what is good for students were one of many influences on their policy enactment during the COVID-19 crisis. In terms of virtual teaching, important factors included teachers’ prior knowledge of online tools and pedagogy, technical aspects of the online platforms, and students’ access to internet-connected devices. Our participants’ experiences with online learning reflect those of teachers in Hong Kong who were forced to teach virtually during school closures due to the SARS crisis in 2003 (Fox, 2007). Many of those educators were similarly unprepared to move their teaching online, faced challenges using new technology, and reported an increase in workload (Fox, 2007). They reported that some students experienced challenges learning online and felt isolated. More hopefully, some stated that the experience provoked improvements in their teaching when they returned to class, including integrating more peer review and self-reflective activities as well as new forms of assessment (Fox, 2007).
Further, we note that the kinds of inconsistencies and gaps between government, board, and school policies that frustrated our participants are not unique to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Mixed messages and gaps are a regular feature of education policy processes, although some policies offer more opportunities for creative responses than others (Ball et al., 2012). The
“discretionary spaces” of policy are where teachers can exercise autonomy to address students’
needs (Bocking, 2020). These spaces have been narrowed over the past decades through disciplinary policies associated with the drive to increase student achievement as indicated by standardized test scores. Our participants pointed to the Alberta government’s policy to allow students to take diploma exams during the 2020–2021 school year as limiting their ability to adjust the curriculum in ways that met students’ needs. Nevertheless, our findings indicate that during the COVID-19 pandemic, as in ordinary times, policies retain opportunities for teachers’
resistance. “Really good teachers,” as our participant SL frames it, require autonomy to refuse rules that are not “appropriate” for the students they teach. Indeed, really good teachers in this formulation have the capacity to reject the construction of teachers as “passive policy subject[s]”
and “technical professional[s]” (Ball et al., 2012, p. 92). As our participant CD explained, this includes pushing back on notions of business as usual that can harm teachers and students and
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instead engaging their ethical discomfort and reflexive judgement to resist policies that negatively impact their students and themselves.
Finally, our findings reveal harmful consequences to teachers’ mental and physical health associated with teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than prioritizing the mental health and well-being of teachers, educators we spoke with felt that their needs were dismissed and diminished. CD explained:
I think I just needed some leadership that was focused on empathy and compassion for students and teachers. I know this has been said a lot outside of this conversation, but like the, I'm going to lose my—I'm going to lose it next time I hear someone talk about you know, “take care of your mental health, self-care is important,” in an email and then nothing changes with your job, nothing's taken off your plate. There's nothing, structural things, actually removed. And the same expectations, and the same things are put on teachers’
plate, which has already been talked to [by previous participants] as if nothing changed.
The uncertainty, urgency, and threat of the crisis unfolded in a pre-existing context of budget cuts and turmoil in Alberta’s education sector. The ATA and collaborators at the University of Calgary examined the impact of “occupational pressures created by societal disruption due to factors such as the COVID-19 crisis, reduced budget allocations from the government treasury, increased class sizes, and diverse and complex classroom composition” (ATA, 2020, p. 7) on educational workers, including teachers, school administrators, support staff, and educational assistants. The study found that many workers were experiencing physical, mental, and emotional symptoms of burnout, including exhaustion, lack of energy, and concentration problems, and just under half experienced compassion fatigue. Compassion fatigue occurs when individuals are unable to undertake the emotional labour required to meet their clients’—in this case, students’—
needs (ATA, 2020).
We conclude with reference to a viral meme circulated by “Teacher Goals” on Facebook that captured the sentiment of CD’s quote, juxtaposing an image of a man in a suit who is floating in a pool of paper surrounding him, head barely kept above water, with an image of Will Farrell yelling to the man “Don’t forget to practice self-care!” It was shared over 10,000 times and received almost 700 comments, most of which describe the various ways teachers feel their labour is exploited during the pandemic. Participants in our interviews, educators in surveys referenced, and actors on social media (a site where teachers voice their experiences) resoundingly expressed frustration with toxic positivity and performative references to wellness modules and exercises.
Instead, teachers in our study expressed the need for flexibility to exercise professional discretion and meaningful and material changes (such as suspending standardized testing) to the working conditions that put unnecessary strain on educators stretched to their limits.
Author Bios
Beyhan Farhadi is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Faculty of Education at York University, a secondary teacher at the Toronto District School Board, and an advocate for an accessible, inclusive, and anti-oppressive public education system. Her research examines the relationship between online learning and educational inequality. She is interested in the role of educational policy, leadership and governance, and grassroots social movements in realizing the democratic goals of schooling.
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Sue Winton is a critical educational policy researcher, Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and co-director of the World Educational Research Association’s International Research Network on Families, Educators, and Communities as Educational Advocates. In addition to her research with Dr. Farhadi on teachers’
policy enactment during COVID-19, Dr. Winton is studying advocacy for and against public funding of private schools across Canada. She is also working with colleagues from Ontario, Germany, and Australia to better understand shifting relationships between immigration, labour, and higher education policies and their implications for international students.
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