Abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic has been undoubtedly a catalyst for educational change on many various levels, among which one of the most important seem the organisational and technological aspects of schooling, which underwent major shifts from traditional to virtual setting. The purpose of the presented research study is to look at those changes in the dynamic of functioning of school and the impact that distance learning has had on the school culture in a comparative perspective, in Poland and Great Britain.

The main objective of the proposed research project is to identify potentially crucial changes in the functioning of school due to its virtual setting caused by the pandemic. Our research focuses primarily on teaching strategies, school rituals, teacher-pupil interactions as well as peer relations during remote learning. The theoretical background underpinning our project is twofold; firstly, it stems from the paradigm of critical pedagogy (Giroux, 2010, McLaren, 2005) defining the process of schooling as a ritual performance and providing us with analytical categories such as school culture, school rituals, resistance culture and teacher types, in order to investigate the dynamic of distance learning and teaching. Furthermore, our approach derives from Anthony Giddens’ structuration theory stressing the importance of order, continuity and routine in social world, which enables us to look at the process of schooling through the prism of the ontological security (Giddens, 1984) in the context of distance education.

Our research findings demonstrate that the functioning of ‘’virtual school’’, in comparison to ‘’traditional school’’, at its core remains unchanged due to strong, long-lasting cultural codes instilled by and within the institution of school. We have found that even though remote education requires the use of different tools and means of teaching, including certain teaching style (in order to do so effectively), the very essence of the process of schooling, particularly the role of a teacher and the role of a pupil, as well as the relationship between them, remain the same or very similar. In a virtual classroom, similarly to a material one, grading and assessment appear to be teachers’ strategy for recalling the definition of the school situation and even further, just like in a traditional setting, it is also quite often a survival strategy, in order to exercise control over a school class, while maintaining ontological security. Nevertheless, it is also clear that technology motivates students to follow the learning process more than to resist against it, as it often happens in the traditional school setting.

Overall, the situation of the pandemic crisis enabled us, researchers, to identify with greater clarity the immanent features of education system, which are often resistant to change, even in the extreme conditions like the Covid-19 rife. Hence, this qualitative research study demonstrates ‘counter-intuitive’ hypothesis about how education system will not change, despite megatrends such as digitalisation, automation and the development of artificial intelligence that have gradually dominated contemporary, globalised world.

Keywords:

School culture, distance learning, Covid-19, social reproduction, education system.