Rethinking the Roles of Teachers: How Has Emergency Remote Teaching Due to COVID-19 Transformed Teachers’ Perceptions of Their Roles in Ukraine?

COVID-19 pandemic forced Ukrainian teachers to operate in a new and unfamiliar online setting, thus laying bare the teaching profession's vulnerabilities across various disciplines and geographical locations. It also amplified inequality of opportunity to such public good as quality education. A grounded theory methodological approach was adopted to discover how emergency remote teaching transformed urban and rural, math-science and humanities teachers' perceptions of their roles. Semi-structured interviews in four Lviv oblast schools helped discover that teachers' collaboration, family engagement, (in)availability of ICT infrastructure, and students' self-study skills and motivation influence teachers' perceptions of their roles. Findings of this exploratory research also reveal that blended education can strengthen teaching and learning and suggest its integration into Ukrainian schools.