School Closure Under COVID-19: Elementary School Teachers, Misrecognition, and the Urban Inequality Impasse in Berlin, Germany

The pandemic-induced school closure requested sacrifices from mothers—and also from teachers. They had to change all routine work activities, more than for example, office workers, losing the everyday bodily presence of children in the classroom, encounters with other teachers and all the haptic aspects of their profession. This paper draws on qualitative interviews with elementary school teachers (grades 1–6) in various neighborhoods of Berlin, Germany, to explore the following questions: How did teachers make sense of the situation? What did they do? What categorizations did they apply in their narratives? For 13 Berlin state schoolteachers, this chapter shows that they felt that their sacrifices remained misrecognized. Conceptually, we connect their emotions to hysteresis and uncertainty. The categorizations which they apply to make sense of their new reality, we argue, draw on contextual differences which we discuss with the notions of ‘grid’ and ‘group’ from cultural theory. Our paper suggests that such categorizations of mothering practices are not inconsequential. The categorizations in teachers’ narratives, we argue, normalize an intensive mothering ideology which sustains educational inequality, and reinforce ideas about this ideology’s spatiality.