Emotional geographies of teaching online classes during COVID-19 pandemic: a case study of Indonesian first-grade elementary school teachers

Abstract

This case study examines Indonesian first-grade teachers’ emotions when teaching online during the pandemic. This study identifies teachers’ emotions towards certain challenges in relation with parents, students, colleagues and school principals. The current study presents the challenges that teachers met and discusses it with emotional geographies theoretical framework. The findings indicate that teachers feel negative emotions and lead them to have emotional distances when encountering issues such as uncooperative parents, excessive working hours, limited resources, teacher–students alienation, learning loss, school-rule demands and colleagues disagreement. On the other hand, the teachers admitted that having cooperative parents and supportive school principals help them to feel positive. A collaborative support from schools, parents and governments is essentially needed to prevent a greater quality loss because of online learning in elementary schools, especially for first-grade students.