The COVID19 crisis has created numerous uncertainties and complex challenges for people on the frontline of education provision – teachers, school leaders, students. Often enough, these challenges were exacerbated by crisis response measures that were introduced fast and without much contingency or support planning. In many countries, a number of hard-fought achievements in the areas of quality, equity, and inclusion in education are now at risk of reversal due to the combined effect of the pandemic and of long-standing problems in education, and of policies that were introduced to address both.

Today, one of the imminent tasks facing education policymakers and practitioners worldwide is the task of swift and sustainable post-COVID education recovery, i.e., in the form of higher financial commitments, new reforms, as well as readiness to learn from the pandemic experience. In the same vein, a global consensus is emerging that teachers must be (and will be) at the heart of such post-COVID education recovery as a driving force in charge of innovation and policy implementation. Yet, how well are teachers prepared for that role, and are they willing and able to take it on in the first place?

Our research seeks an answer to these questions from the perspective of “lessons learned” during the pandemic. Our starting point was the assumption that the anticipated, intended outcomes of a post-COVID recovery policy will depend not only on the design of those policies, but also on the ways in which these policies will be appropriated - creatively interpreted, construed, and refracted through the prism of the experiences, contexts, and identities of those who are implementing them, in this case the teachers. In the same vein, we hypothesized that the attitudes, reactions, and responses of education participants to policies introduced during the public health crisis may be a good enough proxy for the professional context and “mood” in which the appropriation of post-COVID recovery policies will take place and from there – for the success prospects of these policies.

To capture and then analyze first-hand policy appropriation experiences involving schoolteachers during the first year of the pandemic, we turned to social media. We were guided by the consideration that educators often use social media as a means for sharing resources, for student and parent interaction, and for collegial discussions. Social media is also a “location” to which many frontline participants (teachers, parents, administrators) turned to in their effort to navigate the changed context during the Covid-19 crisis. To harvest the evidence we need, we used a newly developed methodology (frontline evidence collection methodology) for sampling content data from social media. The methodology is in line with the theoretical underpinnings of sociocultural policy analysis and digital ethnography and allowed us to safeguard the privacy of individual users, work with a large volume of data while keeping the data collection feasible and relevant, and also to carry out non-automated data harvesting in compliance with the terms of use of the social media platforms. We applied the methodology in a selection of 10 countries in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Northern Africa, and the EU. We scanned the content data generated by a target population (education participants) of 3.9 million users in these countries and harvested a total of 43759 relevant data segments (posts and comments) posted in 45 special interest groups on Facebook in the period March-July 2020 in five countries (Armenia, Kazakhstan, Serbia, Ukraine, and Russia), and September-December 2020 in another six countries (Bulgaria, Estonia, Georgia, Italy, Tunisia, and Ukraine). We then performed multiple rounds of computer-assisted qualitative analysis of the data.

Our results confirm that social media, specifically Facebook, are a rich repository of organically generated evidence on how education participants were transforming official policies into new, locally situated policies, while discussing and arguing over new challenges posed by the crisis, and also over long-standing old problems which were reinforced by it. Our data also shows that in most countries, there is a considerable degree of polarization of attitudes among frontline education participants, and a disparity in their willingness to adapt and trust education authorities and the policies they have introduced. We illustrate these findings and their potential impact on capacity for post-COVID recovery on the in-depth example of one country – Bulgaria – chosen because of its interesting position as member of the European Union which shares a common legacy of post-Soviet education reforms that have left unresolved a number of problems with the teaching profession, such as low payment, aging workforce, unequal treatment, and disparities in working conditions based on city, school type, students’ ethnicity, etc. Our analysis of data from that country reveals a situation of distrust, conflict, and discord, which appears to inhibit progress and leads to situations in which different players and parts of the education sector follow diverging objectives that are different or contradict the overall reform and policy goals. In reference to organizational polarization theory, we extrapolate that in such a context of complex impediments to change and improvement, successful post-COVID recovery may be at risk as well.

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