The Covid-19-virus and its pandemic have affected large parts of everyday-life. During a first lockdown ranging from March to April 2020, all none-system-relevant parts of social and economical life in Germany have been massively reduced or closed completely. These measures heavily impacted the educational system, as well, and repeated in a second lockdown in December 2020 up to now due to massively multiplying infection-numbers.

The paper presents results of a discourse analysis about the German educational system under the Corona-pandemic.

Since April 2020, two weeks after the beginning of the first lockdown, more than 300 press releases from the online newsletter for educational news “Bildungsklick.de” have been collected, all of them broaching the issue of current educational topics during the pandemic. Ranging through all educational segments – from early childhood education (like kindergarten), over school and higher education system to vocational education and adult/continuing education – these press releases include the majority of institutions and participants within the German educational system and their current situation at the point of publishing. The data corpus starts with the beginning of April 2020 until now (February 2021) thus spanning over ten months.

Aside from the actors discourse positions, some changes and challenges forced upon the educational system due to the restrictions in order to slow the spreading of Sars-Cov-2 are of particular interest within this study. This refers to four categories, whose discourse-processes will be examined:
1. The transposition from physical to digital courses („distancing“)
2. The distribution of financial supplies to the educational system
3. The impact of the corona-virus onto equality within the educational system
4. The pandemic’s middle- and long-term effects onto the educational system

Starting with the Problematisation: The educational system under pandemic conditions the concept of discourse analysis with its analysed data will be presented, before the results are going to be highlighted: 

1. Between acceptance and overburdening: The transposition from physical to digital courses

2. Too little, too late, too unjust: The distribution of financial supplies to the educational system

3. Some are born lucky: The impact of the corona-virus onto the situation of educational inequality

4. The pandemic’s middle- and long-term effects onto the educational system

5. The term ”crisis” and its changes within the discourse

At the end an critical outlook will be given: "No time like the present: Chances and challanges"

The methodological approach is the Discourse Analysis (DA) according to Foucault (1981), who defined discourse as more than ways of thinking and producing meaning. Discourse refers to ways of constituting knowledge, together with the social practices, forms of subjectivity and power relations (expressed through language and behavior, and the relationship between language and power) which inhere in such knowledges and relations between them. I extended this methodological approach into a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) according to Fairclough (1995). CDA assumed that social practice and linguistic practice constitute one another and focus on investigating how societal power relations are established and reinforced through language use (at this point CDA differs from DA in that it highlights issues of power asymmetries, manipulation, exploitation, and structural inequities in domains such as education). Fairclough developed a three-dimensional framework for studying discourse, where the aim is to map three separate forms of analysis onto one another: 1. analysis of (spoken or written) language texts, 2. analysis of discourse practice (processes of text production, distribution and consumption) and 3. analysis of discursive events as instances of socio-cultural practice. Particularly, he combines micro, meso and macro-level interpretation. I try to reconstruct the structure of discourses, which are special discourses, interdiscourses as networks between special discourses, Normalism as produced dispositives and the collective symbolic as for example rhetoric figures anchored in cultures. The discourse analysis is going to be implemented through using the Situational Analysis (Clarke 2005) and makes use of coding as relation between deductive and inductive categories to analyse the press releases as documents.

Based on the reconstructed categories, the discourse analysis focusses specifically onto the timeslot of the conversion from presence-classes to online courses on both, schools and universities, which left the participants hardly any time for preparations. Aside from that, the need for financial supplies to the educational system gets focussed. Even before the pandemic, the German educational system was internally claimed to be in need of modernisation. Due to the transition to online courses, financial supplies in all areas of education became necessary, which needed to be approved first-hand by the government. This makes discourse-positions particularly interesting, especially from participants of schools, universities, and the government. Based on the data corpus, the impact of the corona-virus effects onto the situation of educational inequality gets studied, as well. Particularly interesting are the actors (for example participants, students, parents an so on) within the educational system, who have to face more difficulties than others. This discourse is particularly relevant, considering the educational system is supposed to allow each participant equal chances. In addition, a focus is set on the statements considering the pandemic’s middle- and long-term effects onto the educational system. While a general agreement about their existence is unsurprising, the specific characteristics are still debated over by the educational system’s participants. Aside from the discourse analysis special research-interest goes to the term “crisis”. Especially noticeable is the term of “crises” (or “corona-crisis”), which has started to show up due to the worldwide spread of the covid-19-virus. Particular interest goes to the analysis of the term’s usage hailing from differing publishers, as well as that of the term “crisis” in general. It is to be noted that press releases published by the government include the crisis-term far less often than others.

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