Being a Young High School Teacher in Mexico City. Teachers’ Experiences in Times of Pandemic

This work discusses the educational and occupational challenges posed by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic from the point of view of young high school teachers from Mexico City. We sought to identify and compare their teaching practices using the concept of asymmetric educational spaces (Villa Lever et al., 2017) to capture the influence of educational inequalities upon this sector’s response to the health crisis. For this purpose, 22 semi-structured interviews were conducted to an intentional selection of cases from private and public high schools, all from ages 22-30. Interviews were conducted remotely between June and August 2020, the moment of the first wave of COVID-19 infections in the Mexican capital. Drawing on Hochschild’s work (1983), we deploy the concept of “asymmetric educational labours” to show how different institutional resources and social contexts of action shaped the emotional experiences of our informants. Furthermore, this research provides significant insights into the multiple problems experienced by young early career teachers as a social group with little visibility in times of crisis.