It is as if They are Taking Advantage of a Bad Situation - Female School Teachers’ Narratives About Care Work and Online Teaching during Covid-19 in India

Oct 15, 2026

This exploratory qualitative study examines six female school teachers’ narratives in India on navigating increased care work at home alongside online teaching during COVID-19. Guided by a decolonizing feminist framework, it finds the home functioning as a site of resistance to gendered divisions of care through reliance on non-husband family members. Schools appear as sites of institutional betrayal through administrative actions and inactions, including removal of contractual teachers, after-hours meetings, heightened surveillance, and limited digital support, perceived as profit-driven disregard for well-being.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages23

Reading Time58 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Research gap and context

Research questions and theoretical framework

Narrative approach and method

Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE), Volume 25, Issue 2, Special Issue 2023 “It is as if They are Taking Advantage of a Bad Situation”: Female School Teachers’ Narratives About Care Work and Online Teaching during Covid-19 in India Ruchi Saini University of Maryland This exploratory study analyzes six female school teachers’ narratives of navigating increased care work at home with online teaching during COVID-19 in India. A theoretical framework of decolonizing feminist research, with an emphasis on moving beyond Anglo/Eurocentric forms offeminist knowledge-making, frames the study. Based on the interviews, the study reveals that the home emerged as a site for resistance to the gendered division of care work in marriages via the use of the tactical strategy of relying on family members other than the husband. Within the limited scope of the study, the schools emerged as sites of institutional betrayal manifested in administrative actions and inactions such as removing contractual teachers, scheduling meetings outside work hours, increasing surveillance, and not providing digital support. These administrative decisions were perceived by the participants as motivated by proﬁt-making, displaying complete disregard for the teachers’well-being. The ﬁndings advance our understanding of how emergencies such as COVID-19 exacerbate the exploitation offemale members of the labor force who are already marginalized through contractual undervalued work orthe inordinate burden of caregiving. It also oﬀers important suggestions for policymakers concerned with creating safe and inclusive working spaces for female teachers in the global south. Keywords: COVID-19 pandemic, care work, teachers, India, decolonial theory Introduction The COVID-19 pandemic had an overwhelmingly negative impact on marginalized communities across the globe such as people of color, working mothers, people with disabilities, poor people, and informal workers. Female school teachers with children were particularly aﬀected because they had to simultaneously cope with exacerbated gendered inequities linked to care work at home (Borah and Das, 2021; Chauhan, 2020), and challenges linked with online teaching from the home such as digital divide, limited professional training, less attendance, and salary cuts (Kumawat, 2020) . Despite the fact that teacher well-being is a prerequisite for providing students with a safe and quality learning atmosphere, especially in the context of humanitarian crises and emergencies such as COVID-19 (Falk et al., 2019), limited empirical research exists on the lived experiences of female school teachers in the Global South. This qualitative exploratory study addresses the research gap by presenting a narrative inquiry of six female schoolteachers’ experiences of negotiating care work at home with online teaching during COVID-19 in India. India represents a critical site for investigation because of the abysmally low rates of female labor force participation even before the pandemic (Kumar, 2021), the inordinate burden of caregiving on women that includes looking after children and the extended © 2023, Saini. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4 . 0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original author and source are credited. Current Issues in Comparative Education 25(2), 36-58 . “It is as if They are Taking Advantage of a Bad Situation”: Female School Teachers’Narratives About Care Work and Online Teaching during Covid-19 in India family (OECD, 2018), and the nationwide digital divide (Modi & Postario, 2020) . The speciﬁc research questions that the study seeks to answer are: a. How did female school teachers in Delhi (India) navigate care work at home with online teaching during the pandemic? b. To what extent did they feel supported by family members and school personnel in seeking to add

FAQs

What is the focus of the study presented in this article?

The study explores six female school teachers’ experiences of managing increased care work at home while teaching online during COVID-19 in India.

Which theoretical framework guides the research?

The research is guided by a decolonial feminist framework emphasizing movement beyond Anglo/Eurocentric epistemologies through collaboration between researcher and participants.

How do participants describe the role of schools during the pandemic?

Participants describe schools as sites of institutional betrayal, citing administrative actions and inactions such as removing contractual teachers, scheduling meetings outside work hours, increasing surveillance, and not providing digital support.

Oct 15, 2026

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