Teacher resilience in remote English teaching: A narrative inquiry in Indonesian Madrasah Tsanawiyah

Abstract

English teachers in Indonesian Madrasah Tsanawiyah (MTs), Islamic lower-secondary schools under the Ministry of Religious Affairs, adapted to emergency remote teaching during and after the COVID-19 disruption. Against this backdrop, this study uses Clandinin’s three-dimensional narrative inquiry to examine how resilience is shaped through time, relationships, and place. Drawing on five teachers’ diaries, fortnightly reflective essays, and public portal commentaries, it conceptualises resilience as a shifting capacity emerging from the interplay of individual effort, social support, and local constraint. Over time, teachers moved from confusion to more settled routines as trial and error produced workable hybrid timetables. Socially, peer mentoring, parental cooperation, and patient students sustained lessons and eased fatigue. In the place dimension, accounts reveal responses shaped by local school and community conditions, with teachers in low-connectivity sites substituting bandwidth-heavy platforms with familiar low-tech options such as voice-note instruction. Findings are presented as five illustrative case narratives, not as statistically representative patterns. Within these limits, the study contributes a situated account of resilience in non-Western, religious lower-secondary schooling, and points to context-sensitive directions for professional development and infrastructure-aware policy in resource-constrained ELT.