The ability of children in Ukraine to continue their primary education after the Russian invasion is inextricably linked to the direct providers of education – primary school teachers. This study aimed to clarify the psychological effects of the war on Ukrainian primary school teachers and their everyday educational activities, using teachers in the city of Kryvyi Rih as a case study. The research design included personal and professional data, questions on changes in students and the educational process, Psychological Stress Measure (PSM-9), Oldenburg Burnout Inventory (OLBI), Brief Resilience Scale (BRS), and Miroshnyk Teacher’s Roles Self-Assessment Scale (MiTeRoSA) integrated into an online survey conducted three months after the invasion. In the results, primary education in Ukraine during the invasion required teachers (n=495) to make significant changes in their work, namely shifts in schedules, increased workload, conducting remote lessons, providing tutoring for certain students, conducting crisis interventions with a broader range of subjects, and volunteering. The majority of the surveyed practitioners experienced considerable stress due to a significant increase in the amount of time they spent preparing their lessons. The psychological conditions of primary school teachers depended on the number of students who were expelled and new students who had been evacuated from other war-torn regions, the ability of school administrators to re-organize the work for online teaching, and perceived support from colleagues. All of these factors along with resilience were predictors of stress and burnout among teachers in wartime. Teachers experiencing burnout, especially exhaustion, high-stress scores, and low levels of resilience frequently evaluated the performance of their students with more leniency. In addition to a list of typical teachers’ roles (MiTeRoSA), teachers indicated frequently taking on the new roles of a ‘tutor’ and a ‘crisis counselor’ in response to the war.
Since 2011 primary school students with special educational needs (SEN) in Ukraine have been allowed to study alongside mainstream students in the inclusive education program established by the Ministry of Education and Science. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 challenged the possibility of maintaining inclusive education for children with SEN, which required providers to find new solutions. This paper focuses on the first response of inclusion providers in the Ukrainian primary school education system to the challenges of working in wartime from February to May 2022, using teachers in the city of Kryvyi Rih as a case study. A quasi-experimental study (n=495) involved a group of inclusion providers (n=92) in comparison to mainstream primary school teachers (n=403). The research included: collecting data on the professional qualifications and experience of the teachers; questions on changes in the educational process and the number of students; the Psychological Stress Measure; Oldenburg Burnout Inventory; Brief Resilience Scale; and Miroshnyk Teacher’s Roles Self-Assessment Scale (MiTeRoSA), designed as an online survey. The inclusion providers faced numerous challenges due to the war, namely, (a) the enormous workload of preparing for classes (φ*=8.7, p<.01), the extended non-educational work assignments (φ*=5.5, p<.01), working with students (φ*=2.9, p<.01) and their parents (φ*=3.5, p<.01), (b) volunteering at school, and (c) the changed composition of student groups, i.e., students who left school and fled the area (in 64.1% of responses) and incoming students displaced from combat zones (27.2%). Struggling with stress and burnout (self-reported by 48.91% of inclusion providers), using psychological self-care skills and social resilience capacity through the support of the student's parents and colleagues, primary school teachers invented and implemented seven ways to maintain education for the students with SEN, the kind of which depended on the teacher's professional role structure and available social support.
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