Sociology of the COVID-19 Lockdown: Critical Analysis of Its Effects on Private School Teacher Wellbeing

Introduction

This chapter invokes sociological theory in an attempt to understand the impact of COVID-19 global pandemic of society and wellness of classes of people (Mueller et al., 2021). The COVID-19 interregnum struck the entire world in a wink, and in no time, rewriting human history to the later. It was a profoundly, deadly disease that devastated human lives and affected almost every global sector. COVID-19 pandemic, it can be whispered, affected global citizenship whereby the mandatory closure of geo-political boundaries for months was a doleful loss to the virtue of global citizenship. Springer (2020) writes, as COVID-19 began to cast its long shadow across the globe, global citizens spiraled into desperation and doubt. Businesses were shuttered, entire sectors decimated. People were laid off en masse and essential items like toilet paper vanished from store shelves. As of August 2021, the World Health Organization (WHO) had confirmed 214,468,601 global cases of the coronavirus (COVID-19), caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus, of which 4,470,969 were deaths (Olliaro et al., 2021; Mohammed, 2020; Nugraha et al., 2020). In the education sector, COVID-19 had created huge disruption in education systems, affecting nearly 1.6 billion learners in more than 200 countries by 2021 (Sumatra & Roshan, 2021). Because of these monumental and life changing social disruptions, there is substantial reason to consider this strange moment of COVID-19 uncertainty by contemplating fundamental change in teacher education. This change would recognize need for social liberation as the basis for rebuilding global citizenship, and this partly comes with participation of the welfare state in influencing social and global change.

Although numerous studies have documented education effects of COVID-19 on society such as school closures (Dhawan, 2020), social distancing as a deprivation of traditional learning methods (UNESCO, 2020a & 2020b; Holzer et al., 2021), mounting online education (Rieley, 2020; Petrie, 2020), and adoption of “Education in Emergency” policies like blended and flipped classes (Sumitra & Roshan, 2021); there is still no laudable study on COVID-19 effects on teachers’ wellbeing. To fill this empirical gap, this paper argues that there is need to examine the effects of COVID-19 lockdown on private school teachers’ wellbeing as seen from their lived experiences. Man’s wellbeing may be described in the physical, social (Stjerno, 2004), intellectual (Sumitra & Roshan, 2021), mental and emotional (UNESCO, 2020b), spiritual (Sullivan, 2019) and financial aspects of his or her personal health, whereby each person may be affected by COVID-19 from a different angle of wellness (See fig.1). Therefore, this chapter attempts to espouse the nature and scope of teachers’ wellbeing in the context of these dimensions. The well-being of a person is what is ultimately good for this person because of the various dimensions that define what is of self-interest to this person. Well-being can be both positive and negative, which is why COVID-19 has both positive and negative effects on teachers.

This chapter is divided into five parts. The first part conceptualizes ‘wellbeing’ in context of the welfare state as theoretical framework, as well as highlighting revolutionary collective action as strategy for guaranteeing such wellbeing in times of social emergency. The second part of the chapter reviews global literature on effects of COVID-19. The third part espouses the research strategy utilized to best capture participant lived voices about the effect of COVID-19 lockdown on private school teachers’ wellbeing, while the fourth part presents and discusses emerging themes from the empirical study. The fifth part provides the conclusion which articulates the chapter’s implications on teacher education.