Digital labor of school teachers and their well-being: content analysis of English-language dailies in India

Abstract

The concept of online and hybrid classrooms has penetrated mainstream school education in India during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. It has popularized digital technologies mediated teaching in schools and ensuing digital labor has affected the everyday routine activities of teachers. The sudden shift to the unfamiliar domain of digital labor has an impact on the well-being of teachers. This paper studies well-being through the theory of stress and coping with coping viewed through the lens of social systems theory. For this purpose, articles related to online teaching in the top three Indian English language dailies, namely the Hindustan Times, The Hindu and The Indian Express were analyzed using the Factiva database and content analysis research tool. Eighty-six articles were analyzed from March 2020 to July 2021 when online teaching commenced and continued into hybrid teaching in India. Novel sources of stress factors and their coping using resources among school teachers were identified using selective coding in NVivo software. It was found that only limited resources were provided at different levels of social systems to address the identified sources of stress factors. Finally, sentiment analysis of school teachers revealed negative sentiment indicating low levels of job satisfaction. Hence, it was concluded that digital labor had a deteriorating effect on the well-being of Indian school teachers.