The current COVID-19 pandemic crisis has affected school community members (students, teachers, parents, etc.) and has brought extraordinary challenges. This crisis has not only affected students’ and teachers’ lives but also their learning-teaching environments and methods. Most countries around the world closed educational institutions to control the spread of COVID-19. In Greece, the Ministry of Education closed all schools around the country in March 2020. During that first lockdown, after an initial period of numbness and without any official instructions given by the Ministry of Education, many teachers managed to adapt to the new reality, meet the challenges it posed (Koutsogiannis, 2020), and offer various different models of distance education programmes to their students. 

In this presentation, we report the findings of a research study that investigates the reaction of the early childhood education schools in Greece, both in the public and in the private sector, during the first lockdown, home isolation and the suspension of all educational institutions due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Immediately after the compulsory suspension of schools by the Greek government on March 10, 2020, the early childhood education structures contacted students’ families and decided to act against this incarceration. In the absence of central guidance from the official state, the entire society and with it the public, as well as the private early childhood education structures, found themselves unprepared, for the most part, for what had happened (Tsekeris & Zeri, 2020). In practice, we could say that an 'experiment' developed based on the literature as well as on the research on the role of digital media and the parameters that affect education (Koutsogiannis, 2020a). In our opinion, schools’ first reactions revealed the true essence of what they advocate. The reconstruction of their thinking system begins with a definite set of reasons, the reasons they proposed at that time (Foucault, 1972), and these reasons reveal their truth as educational units, their real beliefs and their deep pedagogical goal.

Our research study attempts to shed light upon the reaction of the early childhood schools to the pandemic crisis and to examine the first communications between the school headteachers and students’ parents using analytical tools developed by Michel Foucault (1970, 1972) and refined by Mitchell Dean (1994, 2010). It also attempts a comparison between private and public structures, first in terms of their response, but also in terms of their implemented strategies and practices. What was each school’s major concern in their first communications with their students’ families and with the students themselves? What alternative strategies and practices did schools implement in order to continue education remotely when the education process was interrupted? What did teachers think about these strategies and practices? Did teachers have the ability to take part in the design of these strategies and practices? How do they feel about the whole experience of the suspension of schools during the pandemic? Did the Greek education system help them cope with this unprecedented situation? In our opinion, the answers to these questions will reveal some aspects of the reality of the Greek education system and its ability or inability to be flexible and supportive in crisis situations.

The importance of this study lies in the fact that it is one of the first studies, so far, that aims to shed light upon the content of the communications from early childhood education structures to their students’ families during the first lockdown in Greece, as well as on teachers' views on the school reality that was created during this crisis. There have been similar studies for primary and secondary education but none, so far, for early childhood education.

The nature of our research problem and our research objectives led us to select the methodology of qualitative research. Our area of study was relatively new; therefore, at the strategic level of our research design, in conformity with our epistemological and ontological perspectives, we chose to conduct content analysis and semi-structured interviews. Specifically, we conducted content analysis on the first five email communications between school headteachers and students’ parents, and on the actions and practices that the schools implemented during the lockdown and closure. The purpose of our content analysis was to organize and elicit meaning from the data collected (Robson, 2002) and draw realistic conclusions about schools’ true pedagogical goals. Moreover, we conducted individual semi-structured interviews with some of the teachers, using questions open enough to permit amplification and expansion in order to approach our area in an open way, have an in-depth conversation and explore teachers’ views. For the purposes of exploring our research questions, we employed a ‘purposeful sample’, (Patton, 2002) trying to access a number of interviewees that would allow us to explore our research questions and develop arguments (Robson, 2002). Specifically, we focused on sixteen schools in Athens: eight private and eight public. The schools we chose were located in the center and in the suburbs of Athens. Some of the schools contained large percentages of students from immigrant and working-class Greek families, while others catered mostly to students from middle-class Greek families, with a small percentage of immigrant students. We purposively sampled teachers from these schools based on their profiles and their degree of motivation to take part in the project, and we finally chose sixteen participants who had a considerable diversity of experience between them. The interviews were carried out face-to-face, but also remotely using the Zoom platform.

Our intention in undertaking this study was to shed light upon the way early childhood education schools and their teachers responded to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis and the way they adapted their programmes in order to continue to provide education to their students using different models of home-schooling. Moreover, in our study we attempted to explore the views of some teachers about the teaching practices they followed at their schools, the teaching formats that their schools gave priority to, and the challenges they faced. We are of the opinion that, by revealing (through the content analysis) the schools’ main pedagogical goals during their suspensions and (through the interviews) the views of some of the teachers and the problems they faced and still face, we will provide important data on how to rethink early childhood education in relation to our real social needs in the new COVID-19 era. In order to rethink early childhood education, we must return to basics and seriously consider its purpose; we must also consider in general what it means to be educated, what schools are for and who should decide these things (Ball, 2013). To do the aforementioned, we need to release the innovative potential of schools, teachers, students, parents and communities (Fielding and Moss, 2011); we need to give teachers opportunities to speak, discuss, challenge and critique the current situation. Opening up these issues and adding to the dialogue about the purpose of early childhood education during the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, creating a space for revealing and reflecting upon this by bringing forward the voices of teachers and allowing their diversity and complexity to speak through their performances, and finally by inviting critique through new questions that will emerge from our analysis – these are the expected outcomes of our study.

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