What do people write about COVID-19 and teaching, publicly? Insulators and threats to newly habituated and institutionalized practices for instruction.

Abstract

Covid represents major changes in teaching across the world. This study examined some of those changes through tweets that contained threats and insulators to habitualization of newer teaching practices. The investigator harvested tweets to determine sentiment differences between teaching and schools and teaching and online. Topic modeling explored the topics in two separate corpora. Omnibus Yuen's robust bootstrapped t-tests tested for sentiment differences between the two corpora based on emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, etc. Qualitative responses voiced ideas of insulation and threats to teaching modalities institutionalized during the pandemic. The investigator found that 'teaching and school' was associated with higher anger, distrust, and negative emotions than 'teaching and online' corpus sets. Qualitative responses indicated support for online instruction, albeit complicated by topic modeling concerns with the modality. Some twitter responses criticized government actions as restrictive. The investigator concluded that insulation and threats towards habitualization and institutionalization of newer teaching modalities during covid are rich and sometimes at odds with each other, showing tension at times.