Resilience in university teachers: facing challenges in times of a pandemic

Abstract

With the arrival of the pandemic and the interruption of in-person academic activity, Universities found themselves exposed to constant transformations in the teaching-learning models. Changes marked by the need to create new scenarios, in which the attendance in the classroom was substituted by virtual education, obligating the faculty to urgently abandon the traditional educational model. In this context, it begins the research that results in this article, whose objective is the analysis of the faculty´s resilience in the adaptation of the teaching-learning process in the higher education system. With a qualitative approach and an exploratory and descriptive nature, it focuses on the study of the resilience of teachers in the face of the pandemic and the role of teachers in the face of virtualization. 12 Semi-structured interviews with a thematic script, administered by mail and videoconference, were conducted with the faculty from 6 Latin American universities and 4 European universities, during the months of June to December 2020. We may conclude that a resilient attitude is observed among the faculty that participated in the study, which finds an opportunity in the pandemic to reinvent itself and improve their teaching. The results provide new information about the capacity of the faculty´s adaptation, showing the strength of the higher education system in adverse circumstances. They advocate a hybrid teaching in which attendance and virtuality complement each other, although they consider that this could lead to a paradigm shift, as a result of a greater demand for accompaniment and tutoring of students during the learning process.