Crisis-prompted online language teaching: a qualitative inquiry into autonomy among teachers in refugee settings

Language is central to issues of displacement and education. This paper examines how English language teachers in refugee settings negotiated and exercised autonomy in teaching and learning in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. It draws on the notion of autonomy and its dynamics in language classrooms in refugee settings. The paper focuses on one displacement context – Jordan’s refugee settings – to offer a fine-grained analysis of teachers’ accounts to synthesise how teachers negotiated the transition to online teaching and developed practices and relations across different sites. The study recognises teachers’ rights in contributing their own experience and expertise and draws on the Participatory Ethnographic Evaluation Research (PEER) methodology, which involved working closely with a group of six language teachers as peer researchers, who conducted in-depth interviews with two of their peers. The analysis examines the ways in which autonomy was exercised, mobilised, resourced, constrained and shaped by contextual factors during the pandemic and thus provides a nuanced understanding of teachers’ experiences. The study points to the importance of understanding teacher autonomy in the context of language teaching in technology-poor environments. By providing critical insights into the dynamics of teacher autonomy in unique professional settings, it contributes to the broader discourse on digital language learning and agency, roles and skills needed by teachers to support crisis preparedness for the future.