The Covid-19 Pandemic impacted teachers worldwide in profound ways. Studies have reported findings about how the experience affected teachers in numerous ways including the effects on teacher identity, teacher attrition, teacher burnout, and how teachers successfully managed implementing technology under abrupt conditions during the emergency remote period from March 2020 until June 2020. However, the uncertain working conditions of the pandemic persisted well after the emergency remote period and into the 2020-21 school year and the 2021-22 school year.. Students and teachers returned to the classrooms, but under incredibly constraining conditions. Little to no research has been published on how teacher identity was affected by teaching through the prolonged period after the emergency remote period. This dissertation presents an autoethnographic study on the effects of the changing and uncertain working conditions on my teacher identity during this prolonged period of the pandemic. Videos of my classes were watched and memos were written. Thematic (Saldana, 2021) and Bakhtinian (1981) tensional analysis was used to analyze my memos in order to understand my experience as I attempted to teach by staying true to my teacher identity through challenging, constricting working conditions. My findings revealed that successful teaching with respect to my teacher identity is dependent on a system that has interdependent parts. These parts are prerequisite conditions–both originating from my teacher beliefs and the working conditions that I typically teach within. When the prerequisite working conditions of my teaching system were changed due to the dramatic social distancing measures during the pandemic, the aspects of my system that were dependent on me were inaccessible. This inaccessibility caused tensions that I experienced in my teacher identity.
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