Engineering faculty’s emotional response during emergency remote teaching

Emergency remote teaching (ERT) during the COVID-19 pandemic entailed drastic changes in education. Faculty faced challenges in their teaching role while immersed in an unprecedented emotional atmosphere. With the aim of characterising potentially vulnerable groups of engineering faculty (those reporting more self-perceived negative emotions), our study analyses answers of 577 faculty members of a Technical University to a survey in 2020. The focus is on emotions in relation to contextual factors and perceived teaching performance. Results show that vulnerable groups in ERT include females, younger generations and individuals with family load. Emotions also impacted faculty's perception of teaching performance, in aspects such as students' competencies and their own teaching improvement. Engineering faculty members feeling negative emotions more frequently could also be unable to recognise their students' and their own development. As teaching performance can be affected by faculty's emotional response, emotional management should be central in professional development plans.