Teaching Learning Disabilities Without Support: Experiences of SPED Trained Teachers in Remote Communities

Teaching learners with learning disabilities in remote schools without formal support strains SPED-trained teachers. With this, we explored the challenges, coping mechanisms, and insights gained by SPED-trained teachers assigned in remote communities. We used single case study design, selected SPED-trained teachers assigned in remote public schools in Caraga, Davao Oriental as our participants, and examined their classroom realities as our bounded case. Using Transactional Model of Stress and Coping as our lens, we found that teachers in remote schools faced not just instructional demands for learning disabilities, but resource scarcity, specialist support gaps, isolation, and system barriers as well; however, this burden was managed not just through available supports and practical strategies but through renewed appraisal of meaning, limits, and progress. Coping was not relied on materials and instructional adjustment alone but by peer support, prayer, and acceptance of personal limits. This realization drove us to consider further study on the role of coping between stressors and teacher well-being as an important future research task.