From emergency remote teaching to post-pandemic practice: lived experiences of primary school English teachers in Costa Rica

Abstract

Introduction:

The global health crisis declared in 2020 generated unprecedented disruptions across educational systems worldwide. In Costa Rica, official mandates issued by the Ministry of Public Education led to the rapid implementation of two modalities previously untested at a national scale: distance education in 2020, largely enacted as emergency remote teaching, and blended learning in 2021 (understood as “combined” education), followed by a phased return to face-to-face instruction in 2022. These shifts reconfigured pedagogical practices, professional roles, and institutional dynamics, particularly within rural contexts. Within these rapidly changing conditions, primary school English teachers were required to adapt their pedagogical approaches to increasingly diverse and unequal learning environments, often with limited resources and support. This situation foregrounded critical issues related to inclusive pedagogies, teacher wellbeing, and ongoing professional growth, as educators navigated the challenges of addressing students' varied needs while sustaining their own emotional and professional resilience.

Method:

This article presents an analytical multiple-case study based on three descriptive single case studies conducted between 2020 and 2024 in rural schools across the regional directorates of Huetar Northern Region: San Carlos, Norte-Norte, and Sarapiquí. The study examined the lived experiences and professional contexts of fifteen primary school English teachers during the pandemic period. Data were generated through semi-structured interviews, document analysis, photo-elicitation, and body mapping. Prior inductive analyses were conducted using ATLAS.ti and WebQDA and were then integrated into a contextualized thematic meta-analysis to deepen the analysis of the academic phenomenon.

Results and discussion:

Findings are organized into five overarching meta-themes: (1) Emerging Educational Contexts, (2) Emotional Experiences in Response to Educational Change, (3) Educational Management in Changing Contexts, (4) Transformations in Teaching and Learning Processes, and (5) Persistent Challenges and Gaps in Teaching and Learning. These findings contribute to ongoing discussions on inclusive pedagogies, teacher wellbeing, and professional development in no-size-fits-all K-12 classrooms, particularly in under-resourced rural settings. Collectively, these themes clarify and provide reflective insights into educational regional and national authorities regarding the complex interplay between structural conditions, affective dimensions, and pedagogical adaptation in rural education settings during and beyond the pandemic.

1 Introduction

The 2020 pandemic provoked a global educational rupture beyond pure logistics because it changed what people used to know as teaching, learning, access, and progress in schools. In Latin America and the Caribbean, this rupture was especially profound, and the pandemic kept 159 million children and adolescents out of the classroom for an average of 159 days (UNICEF, 2024). Teachers were asked to rapidly transform pedagogy, assessment, and communication. From a qualitative perspective, however, these transformations should not be understood only as technical or methodological adjustments, but also as lived and situated experiences that reshaped teachers' work, relationships, and personal lives (González et al., 2023; Robinson et al., 2023). At the same time, all actors in the educational systems in Latin America and the Caribbean faced uncertainty, health risks, and economic instability (UNICEF, 2024). Education was affected by online teaching, equity, and educational technology; and some studies often aimed at the implementation of technology, rather than the longitudinal understanding of teachers' lived experiences throughout the various stages of the phenomenon (Bond et al., 2021).

A significant problem is the tendency to treat the pandemic as a single, homogeneous period despite its changes across phases in education (Kim et al., 2023; Trudel and Sokal, 2023). Yet, Trudel and Sokal (2023) suggest that teachers experiences during the pandemic were dynamic rather than static, as their demands, coping processes, and perceptions changed over time. In Costa Rica, as in many other contexts in Latin America, the response evolved across distinct modalities and institutional guidelines over a three-year period (López-Estrada and Elizondo-Mejías, 2023, MEP, 2020, 2021a, b). For example, the MEP formally framed 2021 around combined education and re-established the mandatory in-person schooling for the 2022 school year (MEP, 2021b, 2022). Framing this phenomenon into phases matters because teachers' views and experiences were shaped by shifting constraints, policy guidelines, and student participation. This phase-based perspective also provides the conceptual grounding for understanding the pandemic not as a single event, but as a sequence of educational changes. Treating 2020–2022 as one undifferentiated block risks minimizing how teachers experienced their teaching in response to the crisis, the hybridity in-between and the return to in-person teaching viewed as a reconfiguration process. Hence, this article aims at providing a broader view of the educational modalities implemented during the pandemic and their impact on the Costa Rican and Latin American contexts from a Global-South perspective. More specifically, the aim of the study was to analyze the lived experiences and expressed perceptions of fifteen primary school English teachers with respect to three single case studies on distance education (2020), blended education (2021) and the return to face-to-face learning (2022) in times of pandemic and post-pandemic in the Huetar Norte Region.

2 Literature review

2.1 Educational modalities during the pandemic

The pandemic forced educational systems worldwide to a quick adaptation as a reaction to the crisis. In Costa Rica, two modalities were adopted: Emergency Remote Teaching (labeled by the authorities as “distance education”), blended learning (coined as combined education) and then the return to in-person education (Elizondo-Mejías et al., 2025; López-Estrada et al., 2025; MEP, 2020).

Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) has been conceptualized as a crisis-driven alternative to planned online and distance education (Hodges et al., 2020). In language teaching, ERT is defined as “a temporary shift of instructional delivery to an alternate delivery mode due to crisis circumstances” (Juárez-Díaz and Perales, 2021, p.123). This concept explains why many school systems' and teachers' early practices were characterized by survival pedagogy: prioritizing contact, continuity, and basic access over a strong redesign of the modality.

Teachers' ERT experiences were defined by lack of preparation, connectivity, and emotional strain (Al Mazrooei et al., 2022; Chatham-Carpenter and Malone, 2023Klusmann et al., 2022; Rahe and Jansen, 2022). Different studies on teachers' ERT experiences linked negative feelings to insufficient internet access and instructional patterns that shifted towards content delivery without interaction (Juárez-Díaz and Perales, 2021; Kim et al., 2021, 2023; Trudel and Sokal, 2023). Similarly, Costa Rican teachers experienced a spectrum of feelings linked to a negative connotation during 2020 (López-Estrada et al., 2024a, b). This evidence supports the argument that ERT should be examined not only as a technological challenge but also as a socio-emotional disruption and a disruption in relationships that happens especially in rural contexts.

Research also indicates that the early pandemic was marked by gaps between what teachers were expected to do and what the system enabled them to do; while they were asked to respond rapidly, they were also managing workload escalation and shifting expectations without the corresponding institutional support or ambiguous guidelines (Klusmann et al., 2022). In that sense, ERT is best understood as the change provoked by a high-pressure context and should not be used as a synonym for distance education or online learning (García Aretio, 2021).

In 2021, as school systems somehow stabilized after the abrupt change, many of them moved from ERT towards a blended modality. Traditionally, blended learning has been understood as “the reflexive integration of face-to-face learning experiences with experiences of online learning” (Garrison and Kanuka, 2004, p. 96). Nevertheless, during the pandemic in Costa Rica, students were given self-study guides to work at home those days when they did not have to attend school (MEP, 2021b) and not necessarily required to work online.

This model was not a technical mix of online and face-to-face elements; it became a pragmatic response to health protocols, attendance variability, and risk management. In Costa Rica, Elizondo-Mejías et al. (2025) reported that teachers experienced multiple modalities because “classes continued to be divided into regular and irregular sessions” (p. 213). Therefore, this model could be treated as an institutionalized hybridity (Wagner et al., 2026): a phase where teachers must design for instability (due to those students who attend, those who will connect, and those who will work asynchronously) while being held accountable for curricular progression.

Such normalization goes beyond the emergency reshaping organizational routines, teacher workload, and expectations for digital competency (Wagner et al., 2026). From perspective, there is a need for multi-phase case studies because hybridity is no longer a phase, but a reorganized condition at schools that redefines planning, assessment, and communication with families (Reeves-Huapaya et al., 2025).

In 2022, in-person instruction was fully reestablished in Costa Rica. This return to the classrooms is often framed as a return to normal. Yet it should be treated as a distinct phase with its own pressures. OECD reports that during the pandemic, Costa Rican “primary and secondary schools were entirely closed for a total of 175 days” (OECD, 2022, p. 24), making it the country with the longest school closure in Latin America. This is why reopening did not erase the pedagogical and emotional residue of disruption: learning gaps, uneven engagement, altered parent-school relationships, and student socialization issues (López-Estrada et al., 2025).

In Costa Rica, the return to classroom teaching involved both recovery work and a reconfiguration of the professional practice. In a recent study, participants described the return as being shaped by adaptation demands and persistence of numerous constraints rather than a simple restoration of pre-pandemic routines (López-Estrada et al., 2025). This aligns with broader views that post-pandemic education constitutes a new phase where teachers integrate the lessons they learned, navigate intensified accountability, and manage the emotional effects of teaching during the crisis (Huang et al., 2024; Klusmann et al., 2022).

2.2 Education in Costa Rica during the pandemic: A global south perspective

The pandemic affected educational systems worldwide, but in the Global South, where the digital divide is a structural determinant of what forms of teaching are possible, the pandemic “multiplied the consequences of digital exclusion” (Miras et al., 2023, p. 936). This crisis exposed prior inequalities in devices, connectivity, and digital competency. Particularly in rural areas, these challenges were amplified by infrastructure limitation and family resource scarcity. Furthermore, Delprato (2026) states, “Students coming from poorer families suffered the most because students’ engagement with remote learning is generally low where parents or caregivers have lower educational levels” (p. 3).

This digital divide in Latin America is a multi-layered issue where access, skills, and outcomes play a key role in how educational continuity can be undermined when inequality accumulates across access, use, and institutional capacity (Barragán Moreno and Lozano Galindo, 2025). In the case of Costa Rica, four possible scenarios were identified based on students' conditions at home: (1) students who had both a device and internet connection, (2) students who had access to a device with limited connectivity, (3) students with a device but no internet access, and (4) students with neither a device nor internet connection (MEP, 2020). In rural areas, students were mostly allocated in scenarios 3 and 4 (López-Estrada et al., 2024a, b) which poses a gap in relation to instruction being delivered in urban areas.

Inequity is not only about online accessibility but also about the quality of engagement, validity of the evaluation and assessment processes, and sustained participation over time (Huang et al., 2024; Miras et al., 2023). For teachers in rural areas, fighting against inequality meant adapting materials, trying to maintain contact, and negotiating attendance and motivation amid the stress provoked by the crisis (Choconta et al., 2026; Elizondo-Mejías et al., 2025, López-Estrada et al., 2024a, b; Monreal-Torres et al., 2025; Ramírez Portilla et al., 2023; Robinson, et al., 2023; UNICEF, 2024) while dealing with the marked difference in home learning conditions, uneven parental support, and unequal opportunities for interaction.

From an intersectional perspective, those pressures can also be understood as mutually reinforcing forms of inequality rather than as separate challenges, as Lara Maestripieri (2021) argues in relation to the differentiated effects of the pandemic across social groups. In this sense, the experience of rural women teachers may be understood through a triple burden in which gender, rurality, and poverty intensify one another. Students' low socioeconomic status often increased the need for low-tech and manual forms of instruction, which expanded teachers' instructional labor; at the same time, rurality reduced access to support systems and specialized preparation, including professional networks and training for multigrade settings, a challenge also noted by Ares-Ferreirós et al. (2025) and Yan and Dai (2025). Under these conditions, gendered expectations positioned women teachers as caregivers both at home and in school, which increased emotional overload and the risk of burnout, as shown in studies on gendered care, institutional support, and women's psychosocial well-being during and after the pandemic (İş, 2025; Thébaud et al., 2024; Thorpe et al., 2024).

A phase-based view to the pandemic clarifies how inequity moved across the 2020–2022 timeline. In 2020 inequity appeared as access and continuity; in 2021 it was about instability and participation; and in 2022 it meant recovery and remediation. Thus, the inequity dynamically reshaped the conditions for continuity and outcomes rather than disappearing once schools reopened (Barragán Moreno and Lozano Galindo, 2025; Miras et al., 20239).

Besides the previously mentioned challenges, teachers' emotions and instructional choices were tightly linked to structural barriers throughout Latin America. For example, language teachers' ERT experiences were commonly characterized by negative feelings and constrained interaction due to the lack of connectivity, minimum support from authorities, and vague guidelines (Choconta et al., 2026; Juárez-Díaz and Perales, 2021; López-Estrada and Elizondo-Mejías, 2023). Furthermore, teachers felt overwhelmed because of the need to adapt materials, design for inclusiveness, and respond to unequal access.

Research in Latin America highlights that emotional burden and self-regulation, access barriers and digital readiness, and adaptation strategies in pedagogy and mediation were aspects that affected teachers during the pandemic (Delprato, 2026). A study on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher stress and mindfulness reports that occupational stress was a major issue among teachers with stressors tied to engagement and participation (Ferreiro Santamaría, 2026). Also, during 2021, students showed irregular attendance which increased teachers' work who tried to plan to accommodate discontinuity (Elizondo-Mejías et al., 2025).

The pandemic sharpened the question of teacher well-being as a condition for sustainable pedagogy since negative emotions were widespread and tied to reduced interaction and digital barriers (Juárez-Díaz and Perales, 2021). This suggests that the emotional experience should be treated as both an outcome and mechanism to cope with the crisis. Teacher agency, for example, was especially visible because teachers were required to improvise solutions, negotiate constraints, and interpret shifting expectations and guidelines; this highlights teachers' capacity to respond depending on institutional support, training availability, and workload arrangements (Klusmann et al., 2022). In rural contexts, agency also included maintaining contact, encouraging participation, and mediating between institutional demands and household realities (López-Estrada et al., 2024a, b). At the same time, an intersectional stance suggests that agency was unevenly distributed because teachers' capacity to respond depended not only on commitment, but also on support networks, economic stability, and relief from gendered caregiving expectations. Thus, teacher well-being should be understood not only as an individual matter of resilience, but also as a condition shaped by gender, place, and socioeconomic inequality (Lara Maestripieri, 2021; Thébaud et al., 2024).

2.3 Research gaps and present study's contributions

Many studies have treated the pandemic as a single episode rather than a sequence of evolving modalities with different constraints and meanings for teachers. In Costa Rica, this problem became more visible because while being one of the Latin American countries with the longest school closures during the crisis, the pandemic intersected with a broader and longer disruption in education which was conceptualized as an educational shutdown (coined as “Apagón Educativo” by the Estado de la Educación, as part of the Programa Estado de la Nación, 2021). This means that the educational system suffered prolonged interruptions of the school cycle, limiting access to the education system and students' learning development which started in 2018 after a major teachers' national strike and accentuated with the health crisis of 2020 (Programa Estado de la Nación, 2023).

What remains underdeveloped is a phase-to-phase meaning-making study: how teachers reinterpret, re-evaluate, and reframe what happened in 2020 once they have lived through distance education in 2020, combined education in 2021 and the return to in-person education in 2022. This multiple-case research design responds to that gap by examining how teachers’ opinions, emotions, and professional judgments shifted as the situation changed across modalities while dealing with the effects of the educational shutdown which persisted and morphed.

Pandemic literature in Costa Rica relies on cross-sectional or single-case snapshots (Elizondo-Mejías et al., 2021, 2025; López-Estrada et al., 2024a, b) or on quantitative studies by Programa Estado de la Nación (2021, 2023). In contrast, this study contributes a multi-phase, embedded-unit analysis that treats 2020 (ERT), 2021 (blended learning), and 2022 (return) as analytically distinct yet connected, and contextualized periods. This is especially valuable in rural areas where teachers dealt with uneven access, and inconsistent student participation.

Finally, by focusing on rural schools within the Huetar Norte Region, the study adds evidence about how teachers navigated the compounded realities of the educational shutdown: pedagogical mediation under constraint, emotional burden and resilience, and identity shifts as teaching moved from emergency response to post-pandemic practice. Ultimately, this study contributes directly to understanding inclusive teaching, teacher wellbeing, and professional development in complex K–12 rural contexts.

3 Methodology

3.1 Research design

The research design adopted a multiple case study approach (Yin, 2018), comprising three individual cases to enable cross-case comparison and to provide a comprehensive and integrated understanding of a complex phenomenon. This multiple case study was structured around embedded units of analysis linked to each individual case. The bounded case was situated within the social phenomenon of the COVID-19 pandemic and focused on the lived experiences and perceived meanings of primary school English teachers working in rural schools within three Regional Education Directorates of the Huetar Norte Region of Costa Rica: San Carlos, Norte-Norte, and Sarapiquí. Three embedded units of analysis were examined: distance education in 2020 (used as a synonym of emergency remote teaching), combined education in 2021 (similar to blended learning), and the return to in-person education in 2022. Each unit of analysis was explored in depth to capture contextual variations in teaching experiences (Scholz and Tietje, 2002).

3.2 Data collection

This study drew on previously collected and triangulated secondary qualitative data from the individual case studies. Data sources included fifteen in-depth virtual semi-structured interviews conducted via Zoom, which were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Interviews served as the primary data source, as they are well suited to exploring lived experiences from participants' own perspectives (Yegidis and Weinbach, 2006). Open-ended questions and follow-up prompts were used to clarify responses and deepen exploration of participants' experiences (Yin, 2009). It also included thirty self-study guides (guías de trabajo autónomo, GTA), comprising fifteen guides perceived by teachers as effective and fifteen perceived as less effective, along with thirty reflective journal entries corresponding to these materials. These three data collection techniques consolidated the base of all three single-case studies. Then, for each study, an innovative technique was added: video recordings (case 1), photo-elicitation processes (case 2), and body mapping (case 3). Visual and arts-based methods helped to further enrich the dataset.

For case 1, six video recordings were analyzed, including three documenting participants' professional contexts and three illustrating instructional planning and pedagogical mediation practices. In case 2, twelve photo-elicitation procedures were conducted using a reflective photography approach adapted from Harper (1988), involving six photographs representing positive experiences and six representing negative experiences related to the teaching and learning process during the pandemic. Participants also produced twelve written reflective notes explaining their selection of images, which supported meaning-making and reflexive analysis (Bautista García-Vera et al., 2018; Harper, 2002; Lauck et al., 2021). Finally, for case 3, three participants engaged in a body mapping face-to-face workshop, producing three individual body maps. Body mapping is a participatory, arts-based method that facilitates the visual and narrative representation of lived experiences, emotions, and contextual realities (Gastaldo et al., 2012, 2018). In this study, body maps represented three educational modalities: distance education (2020), blended education (2021), and the return to in-person education (2022), following a structured guide (Lys et al., 2018). Three testimonial narratives complemented the body maps and captured participants' reflections across these modalities. Together, these data sources enabled an in-depth analysis and robust triangulation across the three cases.

Participants (8 female and 7 male) were all rich informants, in-service primary school teachers who met the following criteria: (a) worked in schools classified under MEP distance education scenarios 3 or 4, based on regional reports on access to technology and connectivity; (b) held permanent (tenured) positions, with a minimum professional rank of PT4 (Profesor titulado 4 or “certified teacher” in English); (c) had between 5 and 15 years of MEP-recognized teaching experience; (d) had no prior experience in distance or blended education before the COVID-19 pandemic; (e) taught during both distance and blended modalities during and after the pandemic; (f) worked in rural primary schools; (g) and were employed in Direction Type 1 or Type 2 schools (no more than 200 students enrolled) (MEP, 2023), with all assigned teaching hours within the same institution. The participants were distributed as follows: four teachers from San Carlos, six teachers from Norte-Norte, and five teachers from Sarapiquí.

3.3 Data analysis

Data analysis considered two analytical dimensions: within-case analysis and cross-case analysis. This approach involved a systematic, reflective, and comparative examination of the findings across the three cases (Kendell et al., 2021; Merriam, 2009), with the aim of identifying both comparable results (literal replication) and contrasting results (theoretical replication) from a holistic perspective of the entire data set (Yin, 2018).

For the single-case analysis, in-depth reviews were conducted to develop a detailed understanding of each case, considering the “facts of the case”, which included a description of each specific context as well as a meaningful collective context. These rich case descriptions provided the contextual framework within which the lived experiences of the teachers occurred. In the cross-case analysis, the intention was to compare and synthesize the findings from the individual cases. Given that the study comprised three single-case studies, it was necessary to identify a mechanism to integrate and synthesize the findings across the three cases (Yin, 2009).

While the single-case analysis included a unified descriptive account, the analysis required a level of complexity beyond purely descriptive analysis. Consequently, the analytical process was consolidated into a more interpretive phase aimed at developing and strengthening a broader understanding and generating an analytic generalization applicable across all cases. Cross-case analysis required sustained familiarization with each case to identify convergent and divergent patterns, with the aim of developing analytic generalizations (Merriam, 2009; Paterson, 2010) related to the socio-educational phenomenon within the specific context of the Huetar Norte Region in Costa Rica.

All three single case studies were based on the principles of Thematic Analysis (TA) by Braun and Clarke (2012). However, to go beyond the original descriptive results of the case studies, a new and more contextualized order of interpretation needed to take place. Some systematic reviews might open a de-contextualization window (for example meta-synthesis or thematic-synthesis); for this study it was the complete opposite. All three education modalities shared similar socioeconomic and demographic scenarios, so contextualizing the themes was of paramount significance. The step of “going beyond” the content of the original studies was achieved by considering all descriptive themes that emerged from the inductive analysis of the studies but condensing them into analytical, contextualized, unifying themes. In other words, the analysis transformed from descriptive to analytical themes.

3.4 Ethical considerations

To enhance the internal validity of this qualitative study, data, investigator, and theory triangulation were employed (Merriam, 2009). Data triangulation was achieved by using multiple methods, as described in the data collection section. Investigator triangulation was supported through the collaborative work of two researchers who have jointly conducted the study since 2020. The research team engaged in continuous, ethical, and systematic collaboration throughout the processes of data analysis and interpretation. Ethical rigor was ensured through the prior collection of informed consent from all participants. Confidentiality was maintained by assigning codes to participants across the three studies, thereby protecting identities, and ensuring responsible data presentation and publication.

4 Results

The results will be presented in three complementary formats: (1) contextualized descriptions organized around five meta-themes—Emerging Educational Contexts, Emotional Experiences in Response to Educational Change, Educational Management in Changing Contexts, Teaching and Learning Processes in Transformation, and Challenges and Gaps in Teaching and Learning; (2) a comparison and contrast table; and (3) and two visual representations illustrating the key findings of the collective case study (Yin, 2009). Together, these formats supported the development of an analytic generalization pertinent to all cases, aimed at explaining the socio-academic phenomenon of educational modalities during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

4.1 Emerging educational contexts

This meta-theme integrated the educational scenarios that emerged and were transformed because of the pandemic in 2020, 2021, and 2022 through the different modalities implemented during the academic year: distance education and blended learning, as well as the return to in-person instruction. It included socioeconomic aspects, modifications in the work, teachers' personal, and family environments, changes in routines, roles, and communication processes. This meta-theme contextualized the changing labor situation and highlighted the expectations of families of teachers. It also allowed for the exploration of how teachers configured and consolidated adaptive and innovative pedagogical practices in the face of unforeseen contexts, how they managed to adapt to new normality, revealing resilience, a sense of self-efficacy, and adaptation in educational environments in persistent progress.

The two modalities of distance and combined education, as well as the return to face-to-face, were all considered emerging; that is, in a state of rapid change and constant evolution. First, nation and worldwide everything was new and unexpected; these truths were transferred to the educational field. Navigating uncertainty was the new norm in schools. In Huetar Northern Region there was an even deeper fracture due to national educational policies that did not make much sense or simply could not be fully attained in rural contexts where the socio-economic issues differed from those in urban areas. Jobs were scarce; families moved; and in some cases, education was no longer a priority, surviving the pandemic was the only urgency. The role of teachers, students, and families drastically changed to roles never experienced before. Basic personal and work routines shifted. Communication processes had to be reimagined to unknown territories; all at the expense of the teaching and learning process.

At the beginning of 2020, the school year was suspended in Costa Rica. MEP was forced to put together a plan of action to deal with the health crisis. One of the dispositions indicated that there were to be four distinct types of scenarios to match the academic, economic, and geographic needs of all students (mentioned in the Data Section). For this study, families were in scenarios 3 and 4; and even in worst scenarios: severe socio-economic conditions, immigrant families, parents with no formal education (sometimes unable to read and write, even in Spanish), families who rely on at least one formal meal a day provided by the school canteen. From this context, students struggled to bare minimums of learning in general, particularly in language learning. Being the pandemic a unique moment in recent history, teachers felt an enormous amount of uncertainty regarding pedagogical issues, not really knowing what to expect, even how to communicate with the students and their families. Teachers experienced change both at personal and professional levels. Their houses became classrooms, their living rooms transformed into offices, and the medley of professional lives was one with their personal lives.

That first year of the pandemic, teachers in rural backgrounds felt unsupported, left alone to tackle a massive task: continue teaching under rather challenging situations. The MEP's approach insufficiently addressed the heterogeneity of rural contexts, in which teachers encountered persistent challenges linked to students' socioeconomic limitations affecting access to connectivity and technological resources. In San Carlos area, one teacher alone who had to move to his hometown 5 h away from his school, and every 2–3 months the teacher would drive his motorcycle with over six hundred hard copies of self-study guides to deliver them one by one to each house of each student. He paid for the copies and the gasoline. It was he and other teachers in the same territory, who later reflected on their emerging self-efficacy coping mechanisms. They argued they were told to use Microsoft Teams to teach and communicate with students and their families, only to realize such impossible tasks. Impossible on so many levels: no internet access, no phone, no connectivity, no knowledge of technology. Teachers willingly took professional development into their own hands and aim at looking for mechanisms to ensure their students did not get behind. WhatsApp became an ally, and that itself partially ensured that at least communication felt closer. Yet overwhelming; teachers were getting endless messages day and night, particularly at night when parents came back from work and had no idea on what the children had to do in English. 2020 was distant and remote for rural schools in Costa Rica.

By 2021, during combined education and after having survived 2020 by learning a new reality, everything changed again. Thus, creating another emerging context unknown to the teachers. There was a balanced combination between remote teaching and face-to-face teaching; something that had never been attempted in Costa Rican schools. It was put in place to begin a smooth transition back to schools, yet numerous obstacles arose. First, families had the right to decide if students could go back to school or remain at home. Second, there were several barriers including family mobility looking for job opportunities, even migration to Nicaragua seeking for economic stability. Third, health protocols; schools implemented a mechanism in which groups had to rotate to comply with specific requirements such as social distancing, face-mask usage, and constant washing of hands. There were only two ways formally established for combined education: continue remotely or attend classes. Yet due to the previously mentioned issues, this never happened. There surged a plethora of possibilities in which teachers, for example, had to teach the same content 2–3 times to 2–3 different sets of students. A classroom with forty-five students that during combined education only allowed fifteen students per classroom, the teachers had to repeat the same content three times, plus continue planning, mediating, evaluating, and addressing issues for the families and students who decided not to attend face-to-face classes in 2021. At this point, the capacity and resilience of teachers who endured deficient conditions—driven by their self-efficacy rather than by pedagogical training provided by the MEP—were fundamental in coping with the challenges they faced. Teaching was time-consuming and teachers began to feel overworked. Something positive came out of this: there was more professional development in place, educational advisors began to support the teachers more, and teacher-teacher personal and professional ties strengthened.

When it was time to return fully to face-to-face classes in 2022, teachers felt yet another change. Accommodating a new normality and all the hassle that came along to returning to school: commuting, expense, staying away from families, adapting to teaching again. Teachers got sick of extraneous days of working, going back to two schools per day (most teachers worked in two schools), and even tiredness felt by physical interactions. They were also exhausted from dealing with countless administrative demands that were suspended during 2020 and 2021. Some health protocols were still in place and in humid and hot areas, the heat and the wearing of the masks became a burden. In addition, teaching pronunciation in English (phonics) required a special type of articulation and emphasis on sounds (which are different from Spanish). Teachers had to scream out the sounds and were depleted at the end of the day. Teachers felt that even when new and unexpected, some processes became normalized. In sum, 2020, 2021, and 2022 were very distinctive educational years yet they all shared the same perception that there were emergent contexts.

4.2 Emotional experiences in response to educational change

This meta-theme addressed the teachers’ affective experiences throughout different moments of the academic year and educational modalities during the pandemic, including distance education, blended learning, and the return to in-person instruction in 2020, 2021, and 2022. It focused on the emotions and feelings experienced during teaching work, such as stress, fatigue, uncertainty, fear, satisfaction, distress, and gratitude, as well as the challenges related to work overload and adaptation to new routines and pedagogical contexts. This meta-theme analyzed how teachers perceived and managed their emotional experiences in response to educational changes, showing a human dimension of extreme exhaustion in the face of emerging situations of uncertainty and transformation (Figure 1).

Figure 1

During the three years that the pandemic affected the educational system in Costa Rica, teachers' emotions were manifested in a variety of feelings that gradually transformed into challenges by 2022 at the return to in-person education. During 2020, most feelings were tainted with negativity. Confusion and doubt emerged at the beginning of the crisis when teachers did not know what was going to happen with the closure of schools, which escalated to concern and anxiety when the first educational guidelines were communicated. Frustration appeared due to, as teachers put it, the vagueness of these directives that left the room open to interpretation from the different Educational Directorates, Educational Districts, and school principals. This made teachers feel some inequity on the way they were asked to carry out the process of distance education. The major emotion experienced was stress provoked by the need not only to guarantee the continuity of the learning process, but also by the demand to use technological tools they were not skillful with, knowing that families and students could not be able to comply due to socio-economic reasons, prepare materials and work on the logistics of delivering them to students, as well as trying to pull through the crisis and keep their families safe.

During the implementation of ERT, teachers expressed some positive feelings. Empathy that derived on a sense responsibility was shown when teachers said they tried understanding that the decisions taken by the authorities seemed improvised in the middle of a crisis that had never been lived worldwide. This led to feeling responsible and working hard to comply with what was asked from them by the authorities. Furthermore, at the end of the school year, teachers felt satisfied with the work they had done, and gratitude emerged because they were able to overcome both personal and professional difficulties.

By 2021, with the beginning of combined education, feelings reduced but they continued being mostly negative, which deeply impacted teachers' wellbeing. Throughout the year, teachers experienced work overload due to the preparation of multiple lesson plans to accommodate students who remained fully at home, and students who adopted the combined modality. Furthermore, the same face-to-face lessons had to be taught three or more times, depending on the number of subgroups that were created to comply with health protocols. By late May, the Ministry of Public Education (MEP) ordered the closure of schools for a month, because of an outburst of COVID-19 cases in the country, uncertainty overcame on teachers because, once again, they were provided with very little information and first-hand information did not come from MEP, but from the media.

Despite all the negative sentiments, teachers also experienced some empathy, responsibility, and satisfaction. Empathy surfaced as a means of understanding that the authorities were forced to make on-the-spot decisions to palliate the crisis. Responsibility was shown by keeping up trying their best to comply with the demands even if that meant being overwhelmed by the amount of work. Satisfaction was exhibited as a way of acknowledging that despite the circumstances they complied with their job and felt it was done to the best of their abilities.

In 2022, during phase three of the pandemic teachers experienced challenges which were connected to their emotions. Readaptation, operational demand, workload reorganization, classroom adjustments, and new routines all emerged as part of the process. After two years of intermittent instruction, teachers needed to readapt to the new normality which included educational lag and a lack of educational competencies on students. Other challenges such as the operational demand and workload reorganization were experienced due to the re-instauration of extracurricular activities such as English festivals, science fairs, arts festivals, along with committees that oversaw the appropriate functioning of the school: quality committee, emergency response committee, nutrition committee, among others. Classroom readjustments included developing educational competencies such as focusing, following instructions, complying with socialization rules, and acting in accordance with classroom rules. Ultimately, teachers needed to adapt to the new routines after two years of being home for the most part or spending some days at home and some days at school.

4.3 Educational and school management in changing contexts

This meta-theme comprehensively addressed the educational dimension and the management and organizational processes from two distinctive educational levels: regional and national during 2020, 2021, and 2022. It included curricular and pedagogical changes, communication processes, educational support, decision-making, implementation of health protocols, and logistics of the distance, blended, and in-person educational modalities. Additionally, it considered teacher training processes and professional development necessary to confront the challenges of educational environments in constant transformation. It analyzed how institutions and teachers managed resources, organized teaching, and coordinated actions to ensure the continuity and quality of learning in changing contexts.

Two unique distinctions happened during pandemic and post pandemic times in Costa Rica: one dealing with national policies and dispositions as demanded by MEP (national level) and one customized to educational directorates and school districts (regional level). A constant during the three years was that both distinctions did not necessarily match the teachers' and students' academic needs and social circumstances: the national and regional dispositions did not go hand in hand. Some reasons to be considered included disparities in what seemed ideal in central areas and the clash with the reality in some of the most remote schools in rural areas in Costa Rica.

During distance education all curricular, pedagogical practices, communication, and professional development processes changed. MEP mandates urged teaching to continue at all costs, yet educational and technological aspects made it impossible for schools to comply and support teachers, families, and students. Flexibility became the norm; schools had to adapt to new realities given the background of the families. Some principals helped with printing and distribution of materials, while others, due to economic and logistics reasons, could not provide the same. Teachers had to cover some or all expenses to guarantee equal conditions for all students. MEP implemented some teacher training processes which were pertinent for teachers teaching in scenarios 1 and 2 which were closer to actual distance education, but irrelevant for scenarios 3 and 4, where teaching leaned more towards emergency remote teaching. Professional development became an empowerment mechanism during the health crisis since it was the teachers who had to learn by themselves. Teachers concurred that it was necessary and mandatory for MEP to establish specific ground rules and generic guidelines to somehow contain the demeaning of the teaching learning process amid the pandemic crisis, yet some rules and strategies fell short, idealist, and unreachable in rural contexts.

In 2021, school management played a significant role in how teachers managed the educational modality of combined education, mainly on schedule flexibility and modality logistics. Schools had to organize themselves to welcome students to face-to-face teaching, which required a tremendous amount of coordination and teacher and administrative collaboration. Logistics demanded not only putting together schedules for various groups simultaneously, but also guaranteeing the necessary physical space, and even coordination for the food give aways (MEP donated special food packets during 2020 and 2021 to low-income families in remote areas). In addition, English advisors in Norte-Norte, for example, put a significant amount of effort in the teacher training process, particularly on how to effectively plan for emergency remote teaching scenarios. It became customary in 2020 and early 2021, that some teachers began “buying” lesson plans, and families began “paying” for asynchronous homework and assignment; a lucrative business which benefitted no one within the system. Principals and advisors raised awareness on these issues, and teachers acknowledged and reflected on their own teaching practices, thus devoting more time to truly learning and getting trained on how to thoughtfully plan, mediate, and assess students' learning under the given circumstances. Schools also managed to implement health protocols to comply with MEP requirements; that is, mandated spacing in the classrooms, for example. In 2020 and 2021, decision-making processes between MEP and school districts seemed disruptive. In 2022, it became evident that articulating both entities demanded more rigor. The process is related to guidelines, orientations, information, or directives during the distance education process and its eventual dissemination.

4.4 Teaching and learning processes in transformation

Throughout the pandemic, educational changes in the Huetar Northern Region included changes in lesson planning, pedagogical mediation, assessment, and the use of technologies (Figure 2). During 2020, teachers were asked to use the self-study guides as their main lesson plan since those were meant to be used by students at home. These guides were used in 2021 during combined education, but slightly differently from the previous year since they included new stages as a way of complying more with the national syllabus. Finally in 2022, planning was done in the template used prior the pandemic with the exception that now teachers needed to integrate a section for remedial teaching.

Figure 2

Assessment was a constant change during the three years as well. In 2020, the evaluation process left exams aside and teachers felt that the expectation was for everyone to pass despite their feeling that some of the work was being done by the parents or someone else. In 2021, some exams or on-site evaluation were implemented; nevertheless, most weight in students' grades was put on their work at home; teachers had the same feeling as the previous year regarding students' work authenticity. In 2022, assessment returned to the way it was before the pandemic, but the teachers' concern focused on students' educational lag and the lack of test taking skills.

One of the major changes that teachers experienced was the use of technologies due to the evident digital divide in rural areas in comparison to urban ones. Even though this aspect mostly impacted education in 2020, it was present throughout the three years of the pandemic. At the beginning of ERT, teachers were asked to create self-study guides and communicate with students via Microsoft Teams which posed a challenge because neither teachers nor students knew how to use the tool. Therefore, teachers did not only have to cope with the changes in planning and mediation but also had to self-train on the use of the video conferencing tool which, in the end, did not work for scenarios 3 and 4. In 2021, teachers felt more confident on the use of Microsoft Teams but continued innovating on other tools that might benefit their students such as Liveworksheets, Kahoot, Quizizz, etc. By 2022, technology was left aside in terms of communication, but teachers used what they had at hand in their classrooms: mostly speakers, video beam projectors, and limited internet connection.

Pedagogical aspects were different during every year of the pandemic. In 2020 changes in pedagogy included planning, mediation, assessment, learning process, and educational resources. Traditional lesson plans were substituted by self-study guides, mediation changed from the classroom to online/home teaching together with the help of WhatsApp to send short videos and explanations, and assessment was done in a more formative manner although teachers had to quantify and provide a grade at the end. In the case of the learning process, teachers felt it was not as fruitful as the previous years because many students were either not complying with the work or someone else seemed to be doing the work. Finally, resources changed from flashcards, worksheets, role-plays, or games, to paper-based self-study guides.

The second year of the pandemic was reported by teachers as being more chaotic in terms of planning, assessment, and delivery. Teachers were asked to prepare a lesson plan both prioritizing the most relevant contents and thought to include students who were attending school and doing some work at home and students who only stayed home the whole year. However, due to limitations to internet connection, this resulted in a variety of sessions: face-to-face, fully distance education, online synchronous sessions, and online asynchronous sessions. Consequently, teachers identified the learning process as unequal among students because they felt that those attending the school were benefitting more when learning pronunciation and speaking. That year, some teachers decided to begin buying lesson plans to lower the workload; some others decided to just make some minor modifications to the plans they had made the year before.

Finally, in 2021 changes focused on the remedial plan teachers had to include in their regular lesson plan due to students' learning lag and the exclusion of some contents the previous two years. This phenomenon once again affected the learning process and made teachers question to what extent the teaching and learning processes were valid in terms of the opportunities they were creating for every student who had a quite different context the previous two years and who were exposed to different modalities mostly in 2021.

Changes in educational and pedagogical aspects led to the normalization of key processes. Pedagogical mediation, lesson planning, and the assessment were progressively re-stabilized across the three years, not as a simple return to pre-pandemic routines, but as a consolidation of the changes shaped by the urgency, unequal access, and accumulated learning gaps. These normalized because, as pointed out by teachers, they were steadily implemented as an imposition coming from the authorities although not fully agreed on by the teachers. Teachers expressed that during the process they felt that the teaching and learning processes transformed and will not be the same for some years after the crisis.

4.5 Challenges and gaps in teaching and learning

This meta-theme addressed the obstacles, challenges, and difficulties faced by teachers and students in the various educational modalities, including distance education (2020), blended learning (2021), and the return to in-person instruction (2022). It included aspects such as lack of educational competencies, reduced effective class time, student burnout syndrome, changes in approval criteria, dual roles, health issues, and limitations in available time and resources. It highlights a marked academic lag perceived by teachers, which accumulated from 2020, with direct effects on the learning processes of students in 2022. The meta-theme allowed for the analysis of how these difficulties impacted teaching and learning processes and how teachers and students adapted to overcome existing gaps in educational environments in constant evolution.

During the three studies, the teachers felt major challenges (Table 1). However, these shared challenges were distinctive in nature. In 2020, a significant challenge was how overworked teachers felt in general; and the uncertainty experienced regarding how to teach and assess their students' learning process. Another key challenge was adapting to changes in the promotion criteria. For example, no student could fail the academic year, content was cut back and drastically simplified, and all work would be based on self-study guides (as mandated by MEP). There was a perception that the students themselves did not complete these guides, leading teachers to believe in a loss of validity in the teaching and learning processes. At the same time, a lack of educational competencies among students became evident. Teachers faced the significant challenge that students might lose essential capacities such as learning to learn, socialization, civic responsibility, collaborative skills, and linguistic communication. There were doubts about whether students could be autonomous at home and whether they were capable of self-regulating their learning.

A challenge experienced exclusively by women teachers was the duality of roles they had to assume in 2020. Women educators were at home working remotely while simultaneously taking on domestic roles: being mothers, homemakers (cooking and cleaning), and primary caregivers for family members. One specific case involved a teacher from Norte-Norte who resigned from her position during the pandemic because her workload, both professionally and domestically, became unsustainable. Also, she experienced the passing away of a close colleague in her school, which affected her emotionally. Another example is a teacher from San Carlos whose partner complained that the dining table had become her desk (full of paper) and questioned why, if she was home all day, dinner was delayed at night. She retrieved from the study and was even hospitalized due to emotional distress. Another woman teacher from Sarapiquí assumed two roles: teacher at work and teacher at home. She had to deliver her classes remotely while also educating her own children at home.

By 2021, some challenges prevailed from the year before. The changes in the passing criteria remained and the lack of educational competencies took place. The teachers perceived two new challenges: a learning lag and student burnout syndrome. For the students who started to attend face-to-face classes, it became clear for teachers that students were not at the academic and linguistic level they were expected to be. They also noticed that the students who attended classes were tired and overwhelmed. The self-study guides were used for all subjects in school (not only English); that is one student had to do 6–8 guides per week. The teachers felt that students experienced a period of burnout syndrome just from being at home stressed and exhausted from all the work they were mandated to do. Teachers referred to students as if their bodies and minds were in a blank state (“mentes en blanco”, in Spanish); as if they had been dormant for two years (“mentes apagadas” in Spanish); as dull learning, as learning never have taken place at all.

In 2022, as a cumulative of two years of overwork and professional and personal burden, some challenges exacerbated, but also new challenges emerged. The lack of educational competencies played a detrimental role once teachers and students returned to face-to-face education; and students' learning was tremendously lagged. Students were indeed left behind. Teachers underwent readaptation processes regarding physical, cognitive, emotional, and technological aspects. Every single personal, educational, and professional aspect appeared to be different from what was once considered “normal” routines prior to the pandemic. This caused various health problems for the teachers (physical and mentally).

A major challenge for teachers was the reduction in effective instructional time. This was due to increased administrative workload and extracurricular activities. Teachers were already experiencing a sense of delay in curriculum coverage and concerns about students' academic level, and suddenly they were required to incorporate multiple activities, not necessarily academic in nature, which reduced the effective time dedicated to English instruction. The accumulation of these challenges led teachers to experience widespread physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion in 2022.

5 Discussion and conclusions

This study contributes to a deeper understanding of teachers' lived experiences in rural areas of the Huetar Northern region of Costa Rica across ERT in 2020, combined/blended education in 2021, and the return to in-person education in 2022. Rather than examining the pandemic as a single event, the findings show a dynamic adjusting process across modalities, consistent with the need to distinguish crisis response from planned distance education (García Aretio, 2021; Hodges et al., 2020) and to conceptualize post-pandemic education as a reconfigured stage rather than a restoration one (Huang et al., 2024; Klusmann et al., 2022). In Costa Rica, this crisis occurred within a broader phenomenon described as an educational shutdown, which contextualizes the presence of learning gaps and dormant schooling experiences reported by teachers (Programa Estado de la Nación, 2021, 2023).

Within this broader framing, across the three stages, context acted as more than a background variable because it actively impacted the ways of teaching. Teachers' experiences of students without connectivity, devices, or literacy resources align with literature framing the digital divide as a multi-layered inequality that intensified during COVID-19 in the Global South (Barragán Moreno and Lozano Galindo, 2025; Miras et al., 2023). The study shows that rural constraints were not just an episode; instead, they shifted their form across modalities (for example, access and continuity in 2020, instability and participation in 2021, and remediation/recovery in 2022) which lines up with claims that inequity morphed rather than disappeared when schools reopened (Barragán Moreno and Lozano Galindo, 2025; Huang et al., 2024).

These shifting constraints also help explain why national measures were often misaligned with rural feasibility, which goes hand in hand with the idea that crisis policies often widen inequality when family resources and institutional capacity diverge (Delprato, 2026; UNICEF, 2024). Teachers' experiences delivering printed material and relying on WhatsApp illustrate how rural education continuity depended on teacher agency and personal resource investment, reinforcing that ERT should be understood as a response embedded in structural limitations rather than a mere digital shift (García Aretio, 2021; Hodges et al., 2020).

Importantly, these structural pressures were not only logistical but also affective. Teachers' well-being was disturbed by the negative array of feelings in 2020, which reduced but remained persistent in 2021 and transformed into challenges in 2022. This circumstance aligns with the link of ERT to stress, uncertainty, and educational burden arising from rapid change, unclear expectations and guidelines, and limited support (Al Mazrooei et al., 2022; Klusmann et al., 2022). Specifically in language teaching, teachers' negative emotions during the pandemic are connected to constrained interaction, connectivity barriers, and the shift toward survival pedagogy (Juárez-Díaz and Perales, 2021); which was fully apprehended by amplifying teachers' voices and lived experiences. As evidenced in the literature, post-pandemic practice constitutes a distinct professional phase (Huang et al., 2024; Klusmann et al., 2022; López-Estrada et al., 2025); in the study, it is clear that teachers did not simply adapt and recover; instead, the return to in-person education created a new affective load tied to remediation, re-socialization, accumulated administrative demands, and the reality of teaching under residual protocols.

One mechanism through which these pressures intensified was discursive: the jargon used by authorities produced not only confusion but also inequity as inconsistent interpretations translated into uneven expectations, accountability, and demands (Klusmann et al., 2022). In Costa Rica, what was labeled by MEP as “distance education” functioned largely as Emergency Remote Teaching (Hodges et al., 2020). Likewise, “combined education” resembled blended learning as institutionalized hybridity, which means that every school adapted the modality to their contexts, thereby requiring teachers to plan for instability and discontinuity (Garrison and Kanuka, 2004; Reeves-Huapaya et al., 2025; Wagner et al., 2026).

Against this policy and discursive backdrop, across the three stages, the most visible pedagogical transformations involved planning, mediation, and assessment, with self-study guides and home-based tasks reflecting ERT's survival logic by prioritizing continuity over interaction-rich language pedagogy (Juárez-Díaz and Perales, 2021). A further insight is the normalization of altered practices, which supports arguments that blended learning and post-pandemic education redefine what is known as regular teaching (Huang et al., 2024; Wagner et al., 2026). While teachers demonstrated agency through self-training and tool experimentation, this agency unfolded under a limited institutional capacity and uneven infrastructure (UNICEF, 2024).

In turn, these normalized adjustments were experienced as a lived disruption in everyday practices: teachers' expression of students' blank minds or dimmed minds align with Costa Rica's educational shutdown, signaling prolonged interruption and weakened learning routines rather than a short-term learning loss (Programa Estado de la Nación, 2023). By showing the effects at a classroom level (reduced autonomy, weakened learning-to-learn competencies, and resocialization needs) these findings add qualitative depth to regional analyses of how contextual conditions and policy responses reshaped outcomes in Latin America (Delprato, 2026). The study also reveals gendered burden, as women teachers reported intensified domestic-professional overload that became emotionally and physically unsustainable, consistent with evidence on teacher well-being and burnout (Choconta et al., 2026; Monreal-Torres et al., 2025). In that sense, the results suggest that rural recovery and teacher-support efforts should be equity-oriented and attentive to intersecting burdens, rather than framed as gender-neutral, one-size-fits-all interventions (Ares-Ferreirós et al., 2025; Lara Maestripieri, 2021; Thébaud et al., 2024; Yan and Dai, 2025). It was through careful examination of this qualitative research that teachers' voices could be truly heard in a constant seeking of empowerment practices to contextualize and humanize all-learning environments around the world.

5.1 Implications

Impactful health crisis is something no one can anticipate or be fully prepared for, even in developed countries. Global south nations lived the pandemic differently since socio-economic, educational, and technological gaps widened and became more evident. Costa Rica suffered the most, considering it was the country in all Latin America who took the longest to get back to a “normality” of the teaching and learning process. Rural schools in Huetar Northern Region suffered even more. The results of this multiple-case study shed light on the importance of promoting more context-grounded educational policies, where specific needs are validated and used to better cater to the academic needs of the families and their children. Doing this will guarantee a fairer type of high-quality education as one of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 4 Quality Education), which seeks to assure inclusive and fair access by removing barriers to education and addressing inequalities related to marginalized or vulnerable populations such as low-income and immigrant families. MEP, in an emergency state, proposed specific modalities with adapted terminology such as distance and combined education in 2020 and 2021, which created confusion regarding the semantics of such jargon. Distance education as portrayed by MEP was not distance education as it is defined and accepted worldwide. Distance education in Costa Rica was ERT since it was an emergency, there was no preparation, no training, and no technological platforms to tackle the crisis. The same happened with combined education, which is more referred to as blended learning.

A significant implication from this study deals with reflecting on gender-oriented policies; starting a conversation on how intersected identities (being a woman, being a teacher, being a mother, being a wife, working in a rural context) is mandatory. Intersectional paradigms seek to play justice to disregarded groups by making visible that humans (in this case, women) have more than one identity and that individuals play multiple roles who constantly intertwine and affect performance in general. By apprehending more about it, better support can be given in times of chaos and distress. Female teacherś well-being must be at the core of the profession. Teachers have long been overworked; the pandemic worsened such feelings of emotional and mental distress. Voicing what teachers have to say regarding their lived experiences implies formulating more qualitative research projects aimed at celebrating the human dimension, putting emphasis on their feelings, emotions, and opinions; shouting out that the teaching profession matters.

5.2 Limitations and suggestions for further studies

This study focused only on Huetar Northern Region and will highly benefit from other rural areas in Costa Rica or other developing countries in the Global South that share similar socio-economic and geographic characteristics as the ones for the current study; it also paid exclusive emphasis to the teacheŕs perspectives. Further studies should include the perception of administrative staff such as national and regional authorities, local advisers, and school principals. Besides that, and most importantly, more is needed regarding the expectations and roles played by the families, particularly immigrant families, families with null or low technology and literacy rates, and low-income families. Finally, the voice of the students must always be acknowledged and considered in the learning and teaching process. A consolidated, longitudinal qualitatively oriented mixed methods research might contribute to better apprehending the educational phenomenon of a health crisis in rural contexts. Such types of studies could describe complementary points of view while analyzing summative and formative learning from a more holistic approach, where all stake-holders are contemplated.

Another further study can seek to generate a systematization that includes the causes and effects of the response adopted between 2020 and 2022; the Ministry of Public Education in Costa Rica will gain a clearer understanding of how these measures were implemented in rural areas where regulations and guidelines were not fully adapted to the local context. Such study would also help to strengthen communication with rural teachers to develop policies aligned with their realities.

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