Vulnerability and Resilience During Emergency Remote Teaching: Voices of Part-Time University English Language Teachers in Japan

About the Authors

Wendy M. Gough is an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Bunkyo Gakuin University in Tokyo. She has worked as a language teacher in the United States and Japan for over 25 years. Her current interests are in supporting part-time university teachers, curriculum development, and motivating student writers.

Bill Snyder is a Professor in the International Language Education: TESOL Program at Soka University in Hachioji, Japan. He has worked in language teacher education for over 30 years in the United States, Turkey, Armenia, South Korea, and Japan. His current research interests focus on trust in language teaching and the lives of part-time teachers in Japan and elsewhere. 

Chiyuki Yanase is a part-time lecturer at several universities in Tokyo. She holds an MSc in TESOL from Aston University and has over 30 years of experience teaching English at various institutions. Her current research interests focus on teacher and learner well-being, and she continues to explore the science of happiness.

Colin Skeates is currently a part-time lecturer at several universities in Nagoya. At the start of the pandemic, he was a full-time (contract) teacher working for Keio University. He has worked as an English instructor in Thailand and Canada but has spent the majority of his career in Yokohama, Japan. A bit of a jack-of-all-trades, he is interested in several areas of language teaching and learning research, such as the role of AI in language education and professional and faculty development.

Collaborating Authors

Mary Nobuoka has taught all proficiencies and ages ranging from 2 to 82. Since 2010, she has designed and been teaching a content course focusing on soft skills and well-being. She has also served as an executive board member of the Japan Association of Language Teachers (JALT). She currently teaches part-time at Keio University, Waseda University and Aoyama Gakuin University. 

Ray Franklin has been teaching English in Osaka, Japan since 1990, when he came from Colorado, USA for, just a year or two. He has an MS Ed. TESOL from Temple University Japan, and has been teaching part-time at various universities in Kansai since 2000. 

Thomas T. Nishikawa, EdD (University of Liverpool, UK) is a lecturer in International Relations, Ritsumeikan University in Japan. He has worked for 18 years at various Japanese universities. His research interests lie in the areas of foreign faculty integration into a domestic tertiary environment, including traits of non-Japanese faculty used to integrate into the local community. His other specializations include academic writing and communicative skills at the university level.

Acknowledgements

We would like to express our deep and sincere gratitude to all the university part-time instructors who participated in surveys and interviews and generously shared their genuine sentiments, thoughts, and time during the highly stressful circumstances of the 2020 academic year. Your weekly reflections provided invaluable guidance and motivation, enabling us to conduct research and complete this project. Your participation also showcased both vulnerability and resilience within the language teaching profession. It is your voices that demonstrate that teaching is indeed a profession that part-timers take seriously.

It has been a great privilege and honor to study and comprehend the tremendous struggles and efforts of part-time teachers, who form the core workforce of tertiary-level education in Japan. Their dedication and contributions are commendable.

We are immensely grateful to the chapter authors, Mary Nobuoka, Ray Franklin, and Thomas T. Nishikawa, who agreed to contribute their detailed thoughts and voices, despite their demanding schedules as part-time instructors and various other responsibilities. We would also like to thank them for their empathy and patience during the lengthy process of completing this book.

Special thanks go to Online Teaching Japan (OTJ), the online teaching community on Facebook that provided a platform for the four teachers/researchers to initiate discussions and carry out the actual research, including the weekly survey and interviews.

Finally, we would like to express our heartfelt appreciation to the Series editor, Dr. Melodie Cook, and Publisher, Dr. Jo Mynard, at Candlin & Mynard for their encouragement, patience, and guidance throughout the editing process.

List of Tables and Figures

Tables

Reported 2020 Spring Semester Start Dates forJapanese Universities(Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology-Japan, 2020, September)

Universities That Had Started Classes in Japan, as of May 12th and June 1st(Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology-Japan, 2020, July 17)

Gender and Nationality of Participants(Initial Survey)

Teachers’Length of Service, Number of Universities and Faculties Teaching in, and Number of Class Periods Taught PerWeek

Summaryof Participants’ Experience and Work Situation

Source Categories for I-PANAS-SF Items(Zevon & Tellegen, 1982) (p. 40)

Descriptive Statistics of the Results of the I-PANAS-SF

Aspects of Leadership Trust in Schools(Day & Gu, 2010, p. 151)

The Number of Participants Reporting Schools Returning to Face-to-Face Instruction

Background Information of the Interview Participants

Context of 13 Classes Taught in the 2020 School Year

Figures

Coding, Categorization, and Themes of Qualitative Data From the Initial Survey

Overall I-PANAS-SF Positive and Negative Affect Means, Weeks 1–12

I-PANAS-SF Positive Affect Item Means, Weeks 1–12

I-PANAS-SF Negative Affect Item Means, Weeks 1–12

Preface: How This Book Got Started

As more and more news appeared about the coming pandemic in early 2020, Colin (a full-time contract teacher working at Keio University at the time) saw that many of his part-time university teaching friends were having experiences he was not. This prompted an April 28th, 2020 call through social media for collaboration about researching part-time teachers’ reactions to emergency remote teaching (ERT) (Hodges et al., 2020). Chiyuki Yanase (a part-time teacher at various universities in the Tokyo area), Wendy Gough (a tenure-track teacher at Bunkyo Gakuin University at the time), and Bill Snyder (a tenure-track teacher at Soka University at the time) responded to the initial post after seeing it on the Online Teaching Japan Facebook group (Skeates et al., 2021). Chiyuki was interested because she wanted to investigate how other part-time teachers felt. She also wanted to share her insights from ERT. As a full-time teacher with experience using educational technology and who had organized some online workshops to introduce ed-tech platforms in March and April 2020, Wendy was tasked with supporting the teachers in her department at her university. As a result, she wanted to find out about part-time teacher experiences and reflect on ways she could better support the teachers at her university. Bill is a teacher educator and researcher who had been interested in teachers’ emotional experiences of their work. He saw ERT as a unique experience that needed to be documented.

The group held an online Zoom meeting and brainstormed ideas for the project as well as for an initial questionnaire. They decided the aim of the project would be to better understand the working situation of part-time university English teachers at the beginning of ERT and to gauge participating teachers’ emotional well-being during the first semester. Because the pandemic persisted, the project was later enlarged to follow teachers throughout the entire first academic year of ERT. While the weekly survey continued in the fall semester, there was a marked decrease in participation, which made collective analysis of that data unfeasible. Therefore, this book will focus primarily on the spring semester data; however, the individual participant chapters include reflections on the entire academic year.

As will be seen in this book, the team learned an incredible amount about the overall situation of part-time university instructors in Japan and the support they received before and during ERT. They gained insights into how to better assist this integral part of the teaching community as well. What was learned from the initial survey was that this period of ERT meant a significant change to what normal meant for part-time teachers’ working conditions, which affected the relationships these teachers had with their universities, with other teachers, and with themselves.

Part 1: The Study and the Initial Survey

Introduction

2020 began as a normal year for most of us. People around the world were traveling, conducting business, and going about their daily lives as usual. Educators in Japanese higher education were finishing their classes, embarking on marathon grading sessions, and preparing for a spring break that typically lasts from late January or early February until early April. As usual, many went to overseas conferences, took vacations, or traveled home to see family and friends in the early days of the spring break. There were rumblings in the news about the SARS-CoV-2 virus in China, but until an outbreak occurred on the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which was stranded in Yokohama in early February (Sugiyama, 2020), the sickness just seemed like it would be another virus that sometimes makes the rounds and then dies out. Little did anyone expect a short time later, the world would go into lockdown mode, and our lives would be drastically changed as we headed into a once-in-a-century pandemic.

In this book, we aim to discuss how the pandemic affected higher education in Japan, especially from the lens of part-time English teachers. We decided to focus on part-time teachers because they make up the majority of foreign language teachers at Japanese universities (Butler, 2019; Itakura, 2021) yet tend to be overlooked in the literature about the state of language teaching in Japan. This group of teachers is essential to the smooth running of English language classes across the country, and the realities of their work situations should be explored, especially in consideration of how they were affected by the major changes brought about by the pandemic. Looking into part-time teachers’ experiences during the early days of the pandemic sheds light on their hard work and dedication to providing a positive learning experience to their students, as well as bringing an understanding of how universities can support this essential group of teachers better in good times and in bad.

Starting at the Beginning

The first confirmed cases of COVID-19 appeared in December 2019, and the World Health Organization (WHO) began issuing advice on January 10th, 2020 (WHO, 2020, July 30). On March 11th, WHO declared the disease that results from infection of SARS-CoV-2, COVID-19, to be a global pandemic (WHO, 2020). Not only did the pandemic come as a surprise to people all over the world, but it also caused sudden and drastic changes to daily life, including the need for people to isolate themselves in order to prevent the spread of the disease. Countries around the world started implementing measures to contain the spread of the virus. The lengths and types of lockdowns, social distancing measures, quarantines, and mask mandates varied from country to country.

In Japan, isolation during the early days of the pandemic meant curbing the number of people who were commuting to work and school by shifting to working and studying at home. On March 10th, 2020, the Japanese government officially declared the outbreak an emergency. It began implementing zero-interest loans and other subsidies for small businesses and freelance workers and requesting people to refrain from hosting or attending large events (Kyodo News +, 2020a, 2020b). Then, beginning on March 26th, local and regional governments began requesting residents to stay away from schools and offices and to work from home (The Asahi Shimbun, 2020). This unprecedented change caused uncertainty in Japan, where people were not used to teleworking or studying online, and many were not prepared with up-to-date devices, Wi-fi capacity, or space for home offices.

Timing of Decisions About ERT

The timing of the decisions related to modifying the academic year was complicated for a variety of reasons. In Japan, the school year usually begins in April and ends in late March. The first semester runs from April until late July or early August, depending on the university, and the second semester from late September or early October to late January or early February. Before the pandemic, many universities, especially in the greater Tokyo area, had changed their spring semester calendars. This was done so that the first semester of the 2020 academic year would end before the Tokyo Olympics, which were initially scheduled to run from July 24th to August 9th, 2020. Due to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Olympics were ultimately postponed until the next year. Universities in the Kanto area surrounding Tokyo had changed their calendars partially to alleviate anticipated congestion on public transportation caused by the high number of people that were expected to enter Japan for the Olympics. Many students had been recruited to volunteer at the Olympics, so universities changed their schedules to accommodate that as well.

Then, on February 13th, 2020, the Japanese government’s Novel Coronavirus Response Headquarters held a meeting to discuss inbound travel restrictions, strengthening response measures to virus outbreaks, how to support industries negatively affected by travel bans and reinforce international ties by distributing medical devices and equipment to other countries in the region that were affected by Coronavirus outbreaks (The Prime Minister in Action, 2020). Then, on February 28th, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) suddenly announced that elementary, junior- and senior- high schools, schools for special needs education, and upper-secondary specialized training schools would be requested to close from March 2nd until the school year ended later that month. These early MEXT announcements pushed Japanese universities to consider how they would handle classes in the 2020 academic year, and the response from Japanese universities was quite varied. On March 6th, Waseda University in Tokyo was the first to announce that first-semester classes in 2020 would be held online (Waseda University, 2020). In mid-March, other Japanese universities began to follow suit, with most beginning to make decisions about how to hold classes in the spring 2020 semester. Such a delay meant teachers had less than two weeks to prepare for the move to online platforms before the traditional start of the school year. Confusion was further increased as many universities, realizing their unpreparedness for conducting classes fully online, changed the start of the new school year to early May. Table 1 provides an outline of the status of all tertiary institutions in Japan that responded to a government survey about university measures taken, published in the fall of 2020.

Table 1

Reported 2020 Spring Semester Start Dates for Japanese Universities (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology-Japan, 2020, September)

The postponement of the start of the school year was intended to give universities time to prepare for and monitor the situation. From the beginning, some universities made blanket policies regarding class delivery for the full 2020 academic year. Others continued to weigh the situation, deciding to start the semester online and then move to face-to-face classes later in the semester after lockdown recommendations were lifted around the country. Table 2 shows an outline of start dates based on two particular dates: May 12th and June 1st, 2020. As of May 12th, 62% of all institutions had started classes, whereas this number rapidly increased to include almost all institutions by June 1st. Of interest is the number of institutions that were still undecided as of May 12th - just over 30% in total.

Table 2

Universities That Had Started Classes in Japan, as of May 12th and June 1st (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology-Japan, 2020, July 17)

The sudden and delayed shift in the method of course delivery from face-to-face to emergency remote teaching (ERT) meant that universities had to scramble to acquire or update learning management systems (LMS; see Definitions at the end of this chapter for how this term is used in this volume) and decide the best method of course delivery. Online courses were generally divided into two types: real-time (synchronous) and on-demand (asynchronous). Included in this rush were issues with the communication (or lack thereof) between the university administration, teachers, and students that will be discussed in detail throughout the book. In addition to navigating the work environment, teachers also needed to suddenly upgrade their technological skills and hardware, with many universities providing little guidance or training because many full-time faculty and staff were also unskilled in using educational technology.

The uncertainty in March 2020 surrounding this sudden shift from face-to-face instruction to online delivery of the curriculum impacted educational contexts around the world in a variety of ways, which required speedy and unique responses. (Abdel Latif, 2022; An et al., 2021; Can & Silman-Karanfil, 2022; Chen, J., 2021 passim; Chen, M., 2021; Dabrowski, 2020; Dennen et al., 2022 passim; Ferdig et al., 2020 passim; Huang et al., 2021; Le et al., 2022; MacIntyre et al., 2020; Mairitsch et al., 2023; Moser et al., 2021; Petrakovka et al., 2021; Sulis et al., 2023; van der Spoel et al., 2020; Yan & Wang, 2022). As Moser et al. (2021) note, a sudden change like this in teaching is different from a planned one, and its effects may be felt more strongly by teachers. In Japan, too, the need for rapid changes in the delivery of instruction prompted strong reactions from the government as well as among university teachers, staff, and students (Allen, 2021 Apple & Mills, 2022; Cutrone & Beh, 2022; Goda et al., 2022; MEXT 2020 September).

Around this time, an incredible up-surge of posts from Japan-based university English teachers on social media occurred. These included expressions of frustration, cries for help, workshops to introduce applications and ways to teach online, and even new social media groups such as Online Teaching Japan (OTJ) that were deliberately created for teachers to provide support for each other. With these factors in mind, we decided to conduct what initially would be a one-time survey; however, it turned into a year-long project to record the experiences of part-time university English teachers in Japan during the first year of ERT. The book combines details and analysis of the data we collected, as well as extensive quotations from the teacher participants. The quotations from the teachers presented throughout the book have been lightly edited to correct typographical and grammatical errors. The content and tone of the comments have been preserved, though, and demonstrate how powerfully the situation around COVID-19 and ERT impacted their lives.

Overview of the Book

The book’s primary focus is about the experiences of Japan-based part-time university English instructors during the first year of ERT, from May 2020 to March 2021. It involves both local and international language instructors and includes data and insights related to the participants’ lives that show their dedication to their profession, resilience, well-being, and ability to cope and adjust during highly stressful times. To supplement our research, sources have been collected to better understand what part-time Japanese university English language teachers experienced before and during the 2020–2021 academic school year. We hope readers will not only learn about our participants’ experiences during ERT, but also understand underlying issues related to the position of part-time English instructors within their institutions in both good times and bad. We also hope the insights shared through our data analysis will help full-time teachers and administrators develop better methods of support for part-time teachers at the institutional level.

The book is divided into four Parts. In Part 1 (Chapters 1 and 2), we contextualize and present the results of the initial survey administered between May 4th and 16th, 2020. Chapter 1 provides a brief introduction to the Japanese university system and the working conditions of part-time instructors in that system. Following this overview, the demographic backgrounds of our participants, as well as their experience teaching with technology prior to the pandemic, are presented based on their responses to the initial survey. After this introduction to the teachers, in Chapter 2, we provide an analysis of the teachers’ responses to the International Positive and Negative Affect Schedule - Short Form (I-PANAS-SF) (Thompson, 2007) and an open-ended question, which made up the final sections of the initial survey. The I-PANAS-SF was used to measure aspects of the teachers’ mood at the start of ERT, with the open-ended question giving them the opportunity to expand on their response to the I-PANAS-SF. The data discussed in the chapter shows participants’ initial reactions to ERT, which highlights their vulnerability in the Japanese university system as well as their resilience and professionalism despite the stressful time.

In Part 2 (Chapters 3 and 4), we summarize the data collection procedures and analyze the results of the weekly surveys carried out in the spring 2020 semester. This summary consists only of data from the I-PANAS-SF instrument and the open-ended question that followed it. Chapter 3 focuses on how the issues of vulnerability continued through the spring semester, while the analysis presented in Chapter 4 focuses on data showing the teachers’ resilience over the course of the semester.

To provide a deeper understanding of the meaning of