The disruption of schooling due to the 2020/21 pandemic affected 1.5 billion children, as over 90% of students globally were out of school and enrolled in distance education (UNESCO, 2020). The school lockdown and various hybrid models of schooling exacerbated already known education policy fractures, such as problems with equity and student wellbeing (Burns & Gottschalk, 2020), valuing the teaching profession and risk of teacher burnout (Hargreaves & Fullan, 2020), lack of IT competences of teaching staff and students (e.g. Adnan & Anwar, 2020), and, of course, the lack of IT infrastructure for learning from home. On the other hand, thinking about the school closure crisis and chaos as a challenge for the future (Azorín, 2020), the future of education (OECD, 2020a), and a possible catalyst for educational change (Zhao, 2020) emerged, prompting rethinking of the What, How and Where of education in the future.

Our research aims to contribute to this ongoing discussion about school lockdown by exploring how the very fabric of the education process twists, transforms or deteriorates in unforeseen ways and gets reinterpreted and (hopefully) reconstructed by the key education participants – school children, teachers, and parents.                          

The pandemic-related school lockdowns and its effects on school and societal life brought parents to the forefront of the education process as they had to assume the role of home-teachers (OECD, 2020b), that in turn changed the education interaction from the dyadic teacher-student to a triadic one, bringing in new dynamics into the process of education, and having an impact on the traditional roles of teachers and students as well. Nevertheless, studies exploring the intricacies of the expectations, experiences, and roles of all three key participants in the new situation are still rare, and with rare exceptions (such as Niemi & Kousa, 2020; Bubb & Jones, 2020) the participation of students, teachers, and parents in the loosely structured, unexpected, and abruptly changing situation is in scholarly research still not fully accounted for.

Considering such circumstances, we needed a methodology that holds the potential for capturing processes of meaning-making as they unfold, their richness and dynamic contradictions (Bamberg, 2004; Zittoun, 2006). We opted for the Dynamic story-telling approach (Daiute & Kovač-Cerović, 2017) due to its dialogical capacity (Bakhtin, 1986) to prompt expressive accounts about hard to access areas of experiences, to organize them into meaningful and coherent narratives, and to integrate perspectives of multiple stakeholders around such issues, therefore transforming policies, practices, and research initiatives (e.g. discrimination, segregation and migration - Kovács Cerovic, Grbic, & Vesic, 2018; Daiute, Kovács Cerović, Mićić, Sullu, & Vracar, 2020).

Given this, we expected that narrated experiences of children, teachers, and parents about schooling during lockdown will provide us with a full multiperspective understanding of their expectations, reflections, and stances, a rich material to answer our main research questions:

- How are teacher-student interactions now unfolding and what expectations do the participants share?

- Does the transformed process instill relational trust and trust in education itself?

- Do participants share new emerging meanings of education to build on in a post-COVID era?   

The research results provided insight into the intricacies of the teaching-learning process and the relational trust incurred in it from the perspective of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers, highlighting some level of shared understanding, but also values serving each group to navigate their own way through the unprecedented disruption of their routines, social fabric, and the purpose of their engagement in the education process. The results of the analysis of the narratives have relevance for the discussion on the future of education in the post-pandemic era.

The research took place in 2020 in Serbia during two phases of school closure – a full school lockdown during the Spring semester and a hybrid education model during the Autumn semester. The approach we used relies on a qualitative analysis of narratives about distance schooling collected by an online questionnaire, that prompted participants to write a story about their experience of schooling/teaching in the newly altered conditions (or in supporting the schooling of their child, in case of parents), and to write a letter to a peer (student, teacher or parent, respectively) who is soon to experience school lockdown due to the pandemic. More than 800 multi-genre narratives were collected from 200 schoolchildren, 80 teachers and 180 parents. The narrative materials were analysed on the principles of thematic analysis and values analysis (Daiute, 2013). Prior to conducting the analyses, we parsed the narratives into thought units, that were usually one unit per sentence, leading to more than 3500 thought units. Approaching data inductively (Patton, 2002), through an iterative process, we first identified general themes, and then conducted a thorough values analysis. A coding manual encompassing utterances of all three stakeholders in both genres was developed by four researchers collaboratively reading about 10% of the texts. We further applied the manual individually on the next 10% in order to adjust it. The final version of the coding manual included a system of 6 themes and 26 values across the narratives demonstrating the broadness, entanglement, and nuanced positioning of students’, teachers’ and parents’ experiences towards the new, unprecedented educational situation, their role in it, and the perceived role of others. The researchers then applied this manual by coding another 10% of narratives individually for a reliability check. Fleiss’ Kappa coefficient showed adequate agreement among coders (κ = 0.76, p = .000). The remaining 70% of the texts were further coded by using MAXQDA software (50% of the texts is still in the process of coding). From this, further analysis focused our multiperspective lense on the most prominent theme for all three groups, the new way participants dialogued through their narratives the new meaning of instruction.

Analysis thus far revealed five values that are fully shared among students, teachers, and parents. All groups saw the new schooling conditions as overwhelming and demanding, expressed frustrations with technologies and organization, and recognized occasionally the troubles the other parties had. Some notions appeared more often in children’s writings; about 70% of all accounts of ethical problems, 85% of mentioning lack of stimulating environment, and an abundance of newly acquired self-regulatory strategies, that were reported almost exclusively by the children. Teachers’ and parents’ narratives indicated that they are absorbed in solving mushrooming organizational problems while combining their professional role and the role of a parent. Although neither students nor teachers or parents speak of joint efforts to make the uncertainty more bearable and teaching and learning less chaotic, a few narratives pinpoint teachers’ sense of responsibility for students’ well-being and educational outcomes. Surprisingly, however, the importance of educational outcomes surface more often in parents’ narratives (65% of occurrences), and the request to use ICT in creative and constructive ways, as a vehicle to modern pedagogies, is mostly aired by students (more than 70% of occurrences). All three groups’ narratives are also organized around notions of institutional and policy settings, revealing how education structures set conditions for trust in education to dissolve. For example, incongruence between TV lessons and online lessons confuse students about what they should learn, the number of daily lessons teachers conduct in the hybrid model jeopardizes proper lesson planning, etc. Given this, dynamic storytelling indicated not only areas calling for nuanced dialogue and joint meaning making, building on shared understandings of hardships but also resources that such efforts can draw upon such as students’ and parents’ heightened vigilance and interest in a fruitful learning process, students’ strengthened reflexiveness and self-regulation, and teachers’ exploration of the new tools.

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