“I feel that I am always failing”: the existential damage resulting from the hyperconnection of the teaching telework

Abstract

The article aims to analyze the hyperconnection caused by teachers’ telework as a hypothesis of existential damage. Face-to-face teaching during the pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus has been replaced by emergency remote teaching (ERE) to inhibit contagion and thus contribute to containing the global health crisis and ensuring the right to education of children, young people and adults. In this way, teachers had to abruptly adapt to their work through virtual platforms and multiplatform applications for smartphones. This change, in the context of distress caused by the pandemic, can cause existential damage to the teacher due to the violation of the right to disconnection. From this perspective, the research aims to answer the following question: is this a demage of an individual or collective nature? Thus, we bring as a hypothesis: the abrupt change from face-to-face to remote teaching in the way it occurred configures existential damage to the category. For this purpose, this investigation has as general objective: to reflect, based on the abrupt change from face-to-face to remote teaching, how the hyperconnection caused by virtual work configures existential damage to teachers. For the development of this theoretical and exploratory study, a qualitative approach is used, combined with a bibliographic research procedure. As a theoretical framework, we take as a basis Byung-Chul Han’s concept of the performance society. From the elements that characterize the existential damage, we can infer that the remote work of teachers, in such conditions, can contribute to the violation of the right to disconnection and the consequent existential damage.