“You Can Hold Two Things to Be True at the Same Time”: Duality in ECE Teachers’ Emotional Experiences during COVID-19

ABSTRACT This study represents a qualitative exploration of the emotional experiences of early care and education (ECE) teachers during the COVID-19 pandemic. Research questions consisted of the following: 1) What were the emotional experiences of ECE teachers during COVID-19? 2) How do ECE teachers understand, contextualize, and/or negotiate these emotional experiences? Data were drawn from in-depth individual interviews and one focus group discussion with five white female ECE teachers from the Rocky Mountain region of the United States. Researchers engaged in thematic analysis of the data to develop the themes of duality in teachers’ emotional experiences during the pandemic, including connection/disconnection during school closures, yearning/dread in anticipation of school reopening, joy/fear in the return to in-person learning, and acceptance/resistance to their classroom practices in the “new normal” of teaching during COVID-19. These findings were interpreted through a dialectical theory of emotion to explore the inherent duality and complexity of ECE teachers’ lived emotional experiences during COVID-19. This work adds to the emerging research on the effect of COVID-19 on the field of early care and education. Further, it builds theoretical understandings surrounding the complex nature of early childhood teachers’ emotional experiences by offering an in-depth qualitative portrait of emotional duality.