Understanding teacher well-being in the context of teaching with digital technologies: A social representations approach

As the digital transformation of education accelerates, teacher well-being in the context of teaching with digital technologies remains underexplored, particularly from teachers' own perspectives. This exploratory study adopts a bottom-up approach, grounded in social representations theory, to examine how teachers perceive their well-being when teaching with digital technologies. Specifically, it investigates whether this phenomenon qualifies as an object of social representation and explores its relationship to broader representations of teacher well-being and digital technologies. Eighty-six upper secondary teachers in French-speaking Switzerland completed a hierarchical evocation task and a polarity test. Prototypical and similarity analyses were employed to examine the structural composition and attitudinal orientation of this representation. The findings indicate that teacher well-being in the context of teaching with digital technologies constitutes an object of social representation as evidenced by lexical convergence and structural coherence across participants. This representation is structured around five key elements: ease, efficiency, and equipment in the central core, and support and training in the first peripheral zone. The elements of the central core differ from those associated with teacher well-being or digital technologies alone, indicating the emergence of a specific representational field. Some lexical overlap with digital technologies was observed. The attitudinal orientation of the representation is cautiously positive, perceived more favourably than digital technologies alone, yet less so than the broader notion of teacher well-being. This study offers a theoretical foundation and practical insights for the development of context-sensitive strategies in an increasingly digitalised educational landscape.