Teachers’ Telework During the COVID-19 Lockdown in Argentina. Material Conditions and Perspectives on Workload, Social Responsibility and Decision Making

Abstract

In Argentina educational policies dealing with the effects of COVID-19 have encompassed the lockdown of schools in every compulsory educational level and the National Ministry of Education´s demands to all provinces to guarantee the continuation of schooling. This article examines, on the one hand, material conditions and time organisation of secondary school teachers´ telework at the beginning of the confinement. On the other hand, it explores teachers´ perceptions about their participation in the decision-making process that regulated their work, their views on the mental workload that the emergency and forced telework implied, and their social responsibility towards educational inclusion. To do so, it examines the results of an online survey applied to 678 secondary school teachers from the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires, which was carried out at the end of April and at the beginning of May. This piece evidences an increase of work time, in a context of teachers´ material inequalities and diverse institutional cultures (in terms of teachers´ participation, work climate and schools´ previous pedagogic use of TIC), which has impacted on teachers´ mental workload without significantly eroding their trust in school´s ability to educationally support their students.