In spring 2020, school buildings were closed across Europe to contain the coronavirus infection. Learning at home led to new challenges for students, parents, and teachers, as lessons continued to take place, especially in digitalized form, which sparked debates across Europe about adequate technical equipment for households.

After a few weeks, quantitative studies focused on the implementation of this form of teaching and the associated technical challenges. It became apparent that the transfer of teaching from school to the home environment can have different effects on the effects of origin and thus on educational inequalities: In terms of social background, learning resources at home become more significant for students' performance development. This can reinforce existing differences in performance between students from different social backgrounds, as some of them lack sufficient learning resources (cf. Bremm & Racherbäumer 2020; Sangrey et al. 2021; Bonal & González 2020). However, there is currently no evidence of a uniform influence of school closures on academic performance (e.g. Engzell, Frey & Verhagen 2021; Grätz & Lipps 2021; Pensiero, Kelly & Bokhove 2020). In summary, the quantitative studies indicate that there are signs that suspending in-person instruction can amplify social disadvantages.

However, it must be noted that the findings to date on the influences of the coronavirus pandemic have often been collected descriptively due to the rapid development of events. Qualitative-reconstructive perspectives, which examine what school practices within families look like in detail, are so far scarce.

To empirically broaden the research perspective, we therefore looked ethnographically at how families implemented school learning opportunities during school closures to trace changes in everyday life at home. We are interested in ‘how dominance and oppression specifically come about and what role interactions play in this, [which] is an important contribution to a better understanding of power, inequality, and social change’ (Fenstermaker & West 2001, 239; translation by authors). While the European Union, with the Digital Education Action Plan 2021-2027 (cf. European Commission 2020) and the 2030 Digital Compass (cf. European Commission 2021), focuses on the technical equipment and access to digital education, this article centers the examination of ‘relationships, attitudes, the quality of schools and teaching, as well as a reflection on normative target dimensions and control logics of the education system’ (Bremm & Rächerbäumer 2020, 212; translation by the authors), to stimulate the European discourse on educational inequalities beyond technological equipment.

Based on the above findings, the following questions arise:

1. how teaching is manifested in everyday life at home due to the suspension of in-classroom teaching,
2. how social inequalities are constructed by the actors and
3. whether this not only causes social inequality but also reinforces it.

The theoretical framework for this is provided by the doing difference approach (cf. Fenstermaker & West 2001) and Bourdieu's field theory (2012). Interpreting the quantitative findings through the latter reveals that ‘in the social field of education, social inequality is primarily manifested through cultural capital, but at the same time there is always the availability of economic capital’ (Erler, Laimbauer & Sertl 2011, 8; translated by the authors). Initial analyses of the material showed that at significant points, those observed made social inequality a topic, meaning that differences in school practices are also produced and dealt with in home learning (cf. Göhlich, Reh, & Tervooren 2013). In line with the doing difference approach, processes of articulating social inequality can be understood as the differences in terms of gender, class, and ethnicity that are simultaneously produced and addressed in interactions (cf. Fenstermaker & West 2001).

The empirical material focuses on social practices. Extending beyond an action-theoretical approach, practice theory (cf. Reckwitz 2003) emphasizes the focus on the social and associated actions (including interactions with objects). Practice theory thus places the everyday techniques or the knowing-how of actors such as teachers, students, or parents at the center, which helps incorporate not only linguistic but also interaction-theoretical and therein contained power-theoretical perspectives. We examine these construction processes at the micro level, i.e. in families. The families in question are four families from more rural areas in Germany, whom we visited in their homes between April and May 2020. Despite our efforts to gather diverse perspectives on the phenomenon, we were only able to recruit a rather homogeneous group of families to participate in the study. A common feature among the visited families was that at least one parent was able to look after their school-aged child(ren) during the pandemic-induced school closures, thanks to part-time or full-time home office arrangements. We chose an ethnographic-reconstructive approach that makes it possible to analyze practices of difference construction (doing difference) in families. This method aligns with the principles of multi-sited ethnography (cf. Marcus 1995) by following the dynamics that the school sphere was producing during that period. The everyday actions related to school of both pupils and parents were recorded as part of participant observations, open interviews with parents and children were conducted and documents in the form of worksheets and timetables were collected. Initially, field notes and artifacts were openly coded. As a first approach to the data, we chose a category-forming process, interpreting codes that resembled each other as serially occurring iterative practices of the social. We understand individual practices themselves as spatially and temporally bound and therefore sequentially constructed social realities or perceptions of reality by the actors. Following their sequential logic and processuality, the practices were subsequently analyzed using reconstructive methods (e.g. Wernet 2019) and interpreted following inequality theory.

To summarize, we were able to reconstruct three lines of social differentiation in the families: (a) the line of possibilities of technical equipment, (b) the line of parental support and (c) the line of socio-spatial capital. If one compares the cases against the background of Bourdieu's field theory and the doing difference approach in terms of which types of capital are addressed, economic capital in particular comes into play on an explicit level: it is a question of whether one has a printer, pursues a particular form of gainful employment or owns a single-family detached house (with garden) - these resources are effectively put ‘at the service of the school’. In our cases, cultural capital is also thematized - albeit implicitly - as a distinguishing feature: All families present themselves as ‘milieus close to academics’, which leads to a more or less active differentiation from other parents. Such processes of differentiation can be found in several manifestations of school and teaching: the handling of school material, the assumption of roles, and even the prioritization of certain subjects (sport in the garden). In this way, literal ‘subtle differences’ become clear on different levels in situations where teaching takes place in the home environment. In all cases, symbolic capital is referenced: A mother presents herself as a competent substitute teacher, a child is staged as a privileged private school student and spends her free time in the family's large garden, a family boasts that the father can print out assignment sheets at his workplace. In all of the reconstructions, it becomes clear that the families' practices are primarily concerned with recognition as privileged and successful at school, as well as the public display of this. In this way, all parents make it clear discursively where they locate the difference to the supposed others.

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