Resilience in Crisis: Developing Community Through Action Research

Introduction

Teachers, parents, administrators, and children in schools were caught off-guard and were unprepared for the immediate transitions required during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic (Duncan, 2020). Challenges included a lack of resources such as professional development, technology, connectivity, and “digital skills training” for the families and educators working to ensure engaging online learning opportunities for all (Duncan, 2020, p. A11). As a result of these and other severe adjustments required during the crisis, “the level of stress for educators rose exponentially” (Fasanella, 2020, p. 191). The impacts of the pandemic occurred in schools from the United States to China (Wong & Moorhouse, 2020; Yang, et al., 2020), where teachers and students experienced physical and mental stress together and researchers worked to examine the phenomena. Resources then quickly emerged to help the over 90 percent of educators reporting high levels of stress and sacrifice during the crisis (Carello, 2019; Fasanella, 2020).

Four instructors, who taught an online graduate action research course during the pandemic, where most of the graduate students were classroom teachers by day and were also working toward their Master’s in Education, decided to study their graduate teacher-researchers’ daily challenges caused by the pandemic, the ways that they overcame those challenges, and what they took away from this unique experience as teacher action researchers. The focus of this study centers on the challenges faced by the graduate researchers in their classroom settings while accomplishing the required action research projects.

For over 20 years, the master’s degree program in this midwestern university’s College of Education has promoted action research as a strategy to reflectively improve teaching practice while enacting innovations (Herr & Anderson, 2014; Slapac & Navarro, 2011; Zeni, 2001). The program’s focus on teachers as agents of change has resulted in an accumulation of reports documenting the power of action research to build confidence and competence for both new and experienced teachers in order to meet the daily rigor of the profession. Recently, the topics upon which some teachers focused began to shift from issues around traditional pedagogical practices to the mental health of students and, subsequently, to their own personal struggles and challenges. In one author’s courses, from 2016-2018, for example, 35 percent of the report topics were focused on how to improve responses to student behavior caused by histories of trauma. During these same years there was only one study that addressed a teacher’s socio-emotional health. During 2019, three of 30 teachers addressed the topic of what they called, ‘teacher burn-out’ and ‘socio-emotional health of teachers. As with all other stressors on our institutions, the pandemic amplified this parallel dilemma of the teachers’ experiences of secondary trauma and their capacity to meet increasing challenges to students’ emotional health. During 2020 and under the influence of the pandemic, the number of teachers who identified their personal mental health as a priority tripled.

Building on the tradition of encouraging the study of issues present and important to our graduate students, we intentionally designed and taught our courses to provide a situated, supportive environment where they could inquire, reflect, learn, and adopt action research projects to benefit their learners and themselves during one of the most challenging times in global history. While we made some assumptions about the power of inquiry to solve problems, the evidence in this study illuminates concrete affordances and challenges faced by these practitioners in their own unique settings as they engaged in action research projects to improve their practice. To focus our inquiry, we collaboratively developed the following research questions:

• 1.

  What were the main challenges teachers/educators encountered while doing action research during the COVID-19 pandemic?

• 2.

  What were the strategies used by teachers/educators to overcome those challenges?

• 3.

  How have the pandemic times influenced teachers/educators’ resilience and growth?

• 4.

  What were the most relevant lessons teachers/educators learned from the action research experience for their professional career?

Evidence collected from teacher participants situated within an action research course shed light on how teachers navigated service to their students while providing insights into their own self-resiliency.