Teaching Remotely During a Pandemic: Impact of Smart-Working on Teachers’ Professional Identities

This chapter presents a qualitative research project called “Oversight Points.” Fifty-nine Italian teach- ers participated in in-depth semi-structured interviews focusing on their perceptions, grievances, and hopes about remote teaching during the COVID-19 lockdown. Interviewees belong to a national school network and share a longstanding cooperation in blended action research initiatives. The research was inspired by the teacher professional identity (TPI) theory, and dialogical self-theory (DST) was used as an analytic lens. Data was organised through Nuvolar, a software that can generate word-clouds and provide timestamps of related video-clips. Results suggest that teachers are peculiar smart-workers. For them freedom of space and time, self-improvement, and autonomy—distinctive aspects of smart- working—acquire specific meanings, implying both positive and negative aspects. A set of positionings was found. The authors discuss how they compete in determining the re-organisation of teacher identities’ landscape. Finally, they indicate some possible developments and practical implications.