The discomfort with the imposition to teach in distance learning and the strategies for its overcoming

Abstract

Mercantilism in education emerges as a promising market niche and is fed by the distance education. With the proliferation of distance education in Brazilian higher education, the professor, often hired to attend presences classes, is forced to teach online subjects. In addition to realizing the precariousness of his work, in the context of normative pressures the professor suffers discomfort and displeasure, having to adopt psychological defense mechanisms as a way of overcoming them. The article describes the findings of a descriptive and qualitative research carried out with professors who were forced to work in the EaD. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews conducted with higher education professors who, in the period from 2010 to 2017, by institutional imposition assumed responsibility for disciplines offered at a distance. It was possible to verify different dissatisfactions, discomforts and complaints of malaise and identified different types of defense mechanisms adopted as a way of overcoming the normative pressures. The theoretical constructs about the defense mechanisms were based on the psychoanalytic theories postulated by Sigmund Freud.