The global outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to significant changes in education systems worldwide. Following the temporary school closures and subsequent partial school openings, principals as well as teaching staff faced the challenge of transferring established teaching practices to the digital space. In Germany, this hardly seemed feasible in the short term due to insufficient hardware, digital teaching material and a lack of digital skills among teaching staff. Schools serving disadvantaged communities were particularly challenged during this time, since they can be considered as being in a particularly precarious position in terms of their personnel and material resources (e.g. Reimers & Schleicher, 2020).
Regardless of the specific type of instruction, schools often see their central task in establishing social order through practices of disciplining, monitoring, as well as rewarding and punishing (Hertel, 2020). From this “classroom management” perspective, pedagogical discipline seeks to achieve an optimisation of instructional practices for the production of disciplinary orders, thereby maintaining school power relationships. With both spatial orders and physical access being dissolved in distance learning, we seek to analyse how school order is produced and processed in digital space following the school disruptions in the context of COVID-19.
The data basis is provided by a subsample of two group discussions with principals and teaching staff working at schools serving disadvantaged communities in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. These were conducted in the school year 2020/21 and 2021/22. The qualitative analysis is based on reconstructive social research (Bohnsack et al. 2013; Nohl 2012).
Our preliminary findings suggest that teachers and principals addressed lack of physicality as a key issue related to effective monitoring during online teaching. More specifically, teachers raised the topic of student visibility in the distance learning environment, stressing that some students ‘submerged’ and thereby escaped the control of the teachers. In contrast, on-site teaching better allowed to ‘grasp’ the students. At the same time, teachers used available technology as an alternative means to access students' bodies and establish social order. For example, by muting single students in videoconferences, teachers sought to maintain control of their class. To conclude, teachers established on-site instruction as a positive frame of reference compared to online teaching and learning, while finding ways to compensate for the lack of physicality in the virtual classroom by shifting the possibilities for action in distance learning.
