According to UNESCO (2020), 1.5 billion learners were affected by school closures across 191 countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Already in the first wave of the pandemic in early 2020 teachers were expected to become online educators overnight and school children had to adapt to new teaching and learning methods. The Teachers’ Readiness Online (TRIO) study (Gudmundsdottir & Hathaway, 2020) collected perspectives from teachers in the early weeks of online teaching and asked them how prepared they experienced themselves to be. Despite their relative inexperience with online teaching, they were willing to make online learning work for them and their students, adapting a transformative agentic stance (Gudmundsdottir & Hathaway, 2020). One might say that the recent transition to online teaching due to the Covid-19 pandemic has been as rapid as it has been impressive (Osorio-Saez, 2021). Some even claim that digitalization processes, which would previously have taken years to plan and accomplish, have been carried out in record time (Selwyn & Jandrić, 2020).

Thus, there has been a considerable amount of digital acceleration in educational institutions across the globe including in Europe. Schools are being urged to re-organize teaching and learning, especially during periods of school closures. But what about the children and young people, the learners themselves? What are their lived experiences in a Covid-19 pandemic?  How did they manage to adapt to home-schooling and/or adhere to strict distancing rules at school? It is against this backdrop that we present some results from a qualitative study focusing on children and young people’s use, attitudes towards and reflections on ICT in education in six European countries during the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper presents six European country perspectives on the conference theme: Education in a Changing World: The impact of global realities on the prospects and experiences of educational research. In our paper, our goal is to highlight the voices of the learners involved in education during Covid-19.

The study is a part of a large-scale European Horizon 2020 research project focusing on understanding the impact of technological transformations on the Digital Generation (DigiGen.eu). The larger project aims to uncover both harmful and beneficial effects of technology in the everyday lives of children and young people. This includes a focus on education, the home situation, leisure time and civic participation. In this paper, our research question is the following: How do children and young people reflect on their experiences with ICT in education during the Covid-19 pandemic?

We base our work on the ecological-systems theory, which provides a comprehensive framework of environmental influences on development by situating the child or the young people within a system of relationships affected by multiple levels of interactions with the surrounding environment. Bronfenbrenner (1979) organized the contexts of children and young people’s development into five nested environmental systems, with bi-directional influences within and between the systems. Because humans are characterized by the increasingly complex creation and use of complex tools (Maynard et al., 2005), theoretical models of child development require conceptual attention to contemporary tools, particularly those used extensively by children and young people.  These include technological tools as well as a subset of the microsystem (Johnson & Puplampu, 2008).

The empirical data focuses on children and young people’s experiences in an educational setting and includes interviews conducted in the winter of 2020 and through 2021. The sample is composed of a) 26 children and young people between the ages of 10-16 across five European countries; Estonia, Germany, Greece, Norway and Romania. In addition to b) 10 focus group interviews with in total 32 children ages 5-6 and 8-10 in Austria, Estonia, Norway and Romania and c) 10 family interviews with children aged 5-6 and 8-10, one parent and one other family member chosen by the family. The interviews with the younger children and family members were included in our analysis to provide a more holistic picture and the lived experiences of younger children as well. Using semi-structured interviews and focus group interviews, we explored the experiences and views of the children on the topic of ICT in education facing the challenging circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic. The study followed a phenomenological approach that allowed researchers to explore the children’s experiences and views (Creswell, 2013; Patton, 2002) and revealed their lived experiences connected to their education during the pandemic. The interview guidelines were jointly developed by researchers from all participating countries through a process of open communication, active listening and creating clear structures. This process included agreeing on main themes, questions, and follow-up questions to be addressed in the interviews. However, the interview guidelines also included the flexibility of adapting to each participating child’s answers. The way the interviews were conducted varied according to country-specific pandemic developments and associated constraints. While in some countries it was still possible to conduct interviews in person using distancing and face masks (Austria, Norway and partly in Germany), in other countries it was no longer feasible due to the Covid-19 developments and a digital alternative of virtual meetings was adopted (Romania, Greece, Estonia and Germany). The interviews were conducted in the respective national languages and subsequently coded according to themes. After the interviews were transcribed, they were translated into English. Using a qualitative content analysis approach, a set of categories were identified, and thematic coding was performed combining deductive and inductive data analysis approaches (Mayring, 2014). As for a cross-country comparison each participating country team of researchers viewed the data and coded the data separately using the jointly developed category system for afterwards to be analyzed across country cases.

Overall, the study strengthens the notion that children and young people in Europe face different challenges in terms of ICT use in education during the pandemic, however, progress has been observed in all participating countries. A few main themes emerged from the analysis of the interviews with children and young people during the Covid-19 pandemic: 1. Their experiences of ICT use in teaching and learning 2. Their perception of their own learning management 3. Their experiences of support in learning situations 4. Their appraisal of their teachers’ digital competence and readiness to integrate ICT in teaching and preparing them adequately for the digital age 5. Their perception of the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the use of ICT in education and related changes. Furthermore, positive aspects such as more flexibility along with greater responsibility, which was considered somewhat stressful, are mentioned. The children and young people also experienced more individual schoolwork and at times greater workload than before. We clearly see the importance of strengthening self-regulation regarding online schoolwork. Many of the children and young people also expressed frustration due to isolation and lack of social contact with peers. Whereas access to digital tools and the internet varies, several are critical to the digital competence of teachers and the use of technology as a pedagogical tool. This highlighted existing challenges of varying digital access and competence perceived by children and young people. The pandemic has undeniably opened up for new approaches and greater use of online and hybrid teaching. However, with increased expectations towards technology use in education, it is also crucial to provide teachers and students with the necessary digital competence to avoid social exclusion and digital inequalities of any kind.

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