The impact of distance learning on the social practices of schoolchildren during the COVID-19 pandemic: reconstructing values of migrant children in Poland

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Polish government decided to shut down all public and private institutions, including schools, from 12 March 2020. Since then, 4.58 million students from 24,000 schools have remained in their homes and practiced distance learning. Distance learning has greatly affected children's social practices, including domestic, everyday, specialist, and cultural practices. This paper applies social practice theory, rooted in Schatzki's ontological theory of practices, and Shove, Pantzar, and Watson's structure of social practices to study the changes to migrant primary school children's social practices during distance learning in Poland. The data are derived from a subsample of a larger qualitative study of the transnational transition processes of migrant children in Poland. This paper investigates how the COVID-19 lockdown and distance learning have prompted migrant primary school children to reflect on the transformation of traditional social practices and the value of school.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had substantial repercussions in almost every sphere of human life, including its ‘social, cultural, political, educational, psychological, and interpersonal’ aspects (Markowska-Manista and Zakrzewska-Olędzka 2020: 93). Many scholars, scientists, and analysts have been conducting studies of the pandemic's influence on various fields, including migration (Sirkeci and Yucesahin 2020), education (Ministertwo Edukacji Narodowej 2020; OECD 2020; UNESCO 2020), and families (Darmody 2020; WHO 2020). Studies with young people and children reveal the impact on the learning/teaching process, children's well-being, and how families function during times of chaos and disorganization caused by restrictions and limitations (Markowska-Manista and Zakrzewska-Olędzka 2020).

On 12 March 2020, the Polish government introduced restrictions aimed at diminishing the prevalence of COVID-19, a temporary shutdown of educational and cultural institutions (Kancelaria Prezesa Rady Ministrów 2020). There were further limitations on the movement of minors and changes in the workplace. Parks were closed, shopping was limited, and employees of public and private institutions had to work remotely. All these changes were put into effect on April 1 by the Polish Ministry of Interior and Administration (Serwis Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej 2020).

Consequently, changes in how institutions functioned have required modifications to common and long-established social practices, because ‘the traditional daily routines, habits and patterns and the old tools that worked up to this moment are failing to function in the new situation’ (Markowska- Manista and Zakrzewska-Olędzka 2020: 93). Social practices are repetitive actions that emphasize the reproduction of traditional meanings, previously established skills, and certain tools and technologies (Spurling et al. 2013), and thus these practices make history (Kemmis et al.2014).

Welch (2016) mentions different types of practices, that is, specialist practices (going to work or school), cultural practices (socializing outside the home; visiting cultural sites; attending church or community meetings), everyday practices (daily routines, driving, or walking), and domestic practices (running a household to raising a family). These types of social practices reflect children's practices in the following way: specialist (learning), cultural (maintaining interpersonal skills and social contacts), everyday (daily routines), and domestic (relationships with parents and siblings).

This paper is based on the theory of social practices derived from Schatzki's (1996, 2005) ontological theory of practices as spatio-temporal entities. Besides, it employs the structure of social practices proposed by Shove et al. (2012), which consists of three integrated elements (material, competence, and meaning) to study the changes to children's learning practices, social relationships, and the change in daily routines during the COVID-19 outbreak. Additionally, it shows how the newly acquired practices affect children's values and attitudes toward school as an educational and social institution. I argue that a change in one of the elements of the structure of social practices, namely the material, induces a transformation in the other two elements, competence and meaning, as discussed in detail below.

This paper contributes to the studies on the impact of COVID-19 on children's values’ transformation. I focus on how specialist, cultural, and everyday social practices change during the schools’ shutdown. Additionally, I demonstrate how distance learning shapes children's attitudes toward the role of the school as a learning and socializing space.

Social practices theory has a long history and a broad application in a variety of fields, including daily life (Shove et al. 2012), education (Kemmis et al.2014), and learning (Alkemeyer and Burschmann 2017; Lave and Wenger 1991). The roots of the theory of social practices lie in Bourdieu's (1977: 82) concept of habitus, described as a ‘product of history, [that] produces individual and collective practices’. The theory of social practices has been broadly employed by Theodore Schatzki (1996, 2005), who sees these practices as repetitive doings, happening at certain space–time arrangements (Schatzki 2003), through which one improves their abilities and skills.

When the practices become common for all the groups, they are called collective practices (Welch 2016). Children's collective practices are shaped by their daily routines and group activities organized at educational institutions.

Kemmis et al. (2014) distinguished three arrangements of social practices (cultural- discursive, material-economic, and social-political), which exist in sequential dimensions (semantic space, physical space–time, and social space). In such space structures, at home and in school the three dimensions overlap. Both home and school are spaces where children share their activities, knowledge, and feelings with family and classmates. They also constitute the physical space and time that construe the systems where the educational practices are shared and reproduced (Schatzki 2005) and also became vital social spaces to establish and maintain relationships.

The contemporary school system has not changed greatly since the mid-nineteenth century. Children acquire their learning practices through a long history of memories and interactions that are based on previously produced social patterns (Kemmis et al.2014). Therefore, school is not merely an institution that provides instruction regarding the transition of knowledge and skills between generations, but also a space where school participants from various positions interact while jointly performing practices (Alkemeyer and Burschmann 2017).

For many children, especially those who have experienced a transition from one school, place of residence, or even from one country to another, the school often becomes the only place to establish and maintain their social lives. It is also the only place to learn and share educational practices, as many parents are unable to adequately support their children for a variety of reasons (being new themselves to the local language and school culture, their adaptations, feeling overwhelmed by their employment or legalization status, etc.). Moreover, peers and school become important socialization agents (Popyk et al. 2019) and anchors in a host country not only for migrant children but also for their parents (Grzymała-Kazłowska 2018). Because of the COVID-19 outbreak and schools being shut, spaces were swapped and they stopped serving their traditional functions. The school has temporarily stopped being a place that construes new experiences based on old/traditional ones (Bourdieu 1990). Consequently, the home became the space where children, parents, and teachers performed their practices. Thus, distance learning resulted in a substitution (Spurling et al. 2013) of not only specialist practices – attending school, studying at school, methods of learning, etc. – but also cultural, domestic, and everyday practices.

Regarding the ways to change the education system, Kemmis et al. (2014: 3) claimed:

Thus, the traditional education system was automatically transformed because of the changes to the practices and learning/teaching modes from traditional models to distance learning. A study detailing the impact of the COVID-19 lockdown on families with children in Poland (Markowska- Manista and Zakrzewska-Olędzka 2020: 90) noted: To disclose the impact of distance learning on the transformation of practices and the consequences of this transformation, I applied Shove et al.'s (2012) concept of the structure of social practices.

Their concept, which is based on studies of science and technology, consists of the following three elements (mentioned above): material (‘things, technology, tangible physical entities’), competence (‘skills and know-how’), and meaning (‘symbolic meanings, ideas and aspirations’) (Shove et al. 2012: 14). The material element discloses the learning/teaching mode at schools; competencies are the skills every actor in the learning/teaching process must acquire to adapt to the material element; meaning signifies the actors’ values and attitudes toward their relationships since ‘learning [is] embedded in social (power) relations’ (Alkemeyer and Burschmann 2017: 14).

Shove et al. (2012) state that different correlations between the three elements of the social practices can occur within three different scenarios: before the links are made (proto-practices) when they are made (practices), and after they are broken (ex-practices). Proto-practices existed before implementing distance learning and, thus, there were no links yet between the elements. In the second scenario, the current process of social practices performed during distance learning illustrates a full integration of the three elements. In the final scenario, however, there are no links between the elements. Concretely, this represents the temporary interruption of traditional education and demonstrates what will happen to the social practices of distance learning once the school shutdown ends and children return to school. My analysis portrays how the practices are invented or disappear when the links are established and broken between the elements of the specialist, cultural, and everyday practices that migrant children have performed during distance learning in Poland.

An unprecedented number of 44,000 foreign-born children attended Polish schools in the 2018/2019 academic year (Ministerstwo Edukacji Narodowej, 2019). Although this might be a novel phenomenon in the country, media, politicians, and scholars worldwide have drawn attention to the issue of migrant children for the last few decades because the visibility of migrant children is linked to the growing number of migrants globally (Miller and Castles 2009; Okólski 2012).

In the context of global mass-mobility, Poland as a country of origin has remained a host to a homogeneous nation. According to the Migration Data Portal in 2019, the share of international migrants in Poland was 1.9%. The United Nations informs that, in 2019, the number of immigrants in Poland reached 656,000, and about 14% were under 19 years of age. This means that migrant adults arrived in Poland together with their children and the young population becomes more and more visible.

Previous studies investigated how schools cope with the changing situation (Grzymała-Kazłowska et al.2008). However, limited data are available on transnational transitions (Pustułka and Trąbka 2019) of migrant children, especially those arriving from Ukraine, which constitutes the major ethnic minority group in Poland (Urząd do Spraw Cudzoziemców 2020 ¹), and Turkey, which constitutes a small share of the immigrants in Poland but is worth paying attention to given the cultural and religious differences between Turkish and Polish cultures (Andrejuk 2019). These two groups of migrant children, Ukrainian and Turkish, were given major attention in the present research.

Migration experiences greatly influence the specialist (educational) and cultural (interpersonal) practices of migrant children in a host country. The post-migration adaptation depends on numerous aspects, among which school and family contexts (Rumbaut 2005). The school is a key, and often the only, space for migrant children's language and culture adaptation, as well as for maintaining peer relations, which influence children's well-being and motivation to go to school (Vandell 2000). Consequently, the COVID-19 shutdown brought another transition to migrant children's lives and formation of practices, as presented below.

The study of the transformation of children's social practices is based on the subsample of a larger qualitative study of the transnational transition process for migrant children in Poland, which consists of 49 interviews with children aged 7–13 (N = 20), their parents (N = 19), and teachers (N = 10).² This paper presents the outcomes of the interviews with 19 primary school children, with a migration background (the first interview took place before the lockdown and was held face-to- face) (see Table 1). In part, the interviews aimed to study the impact of distance learning on children's transnational transitions, learning processes, and maintenance of relationships with peers during the school shutdown. Purposeful sampling was used in the study, whereas the channels of recruitment involved the researcher's contacts and snowball sampling technique. The study adopts the child-centered approach (Merriman and Guerin 2006) and active listening to children (Clark and Moss 2001), wherein the interviews with parents and teachers aimed to set the socio-demographic background of immigrant children. The research was conducted in June and July 2020 using Zoom for communicating and recording. All data and materials were directly saved onto an external hard drive accessed only by the researcher. The interviews were held in different languages, that is, English, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, and Turkish (with the presence of a qualified interpreter), to provide the respondents with comfort and the opportunity to express themselves in a native/comprehensive language.

The research follows all the requirements and guidelines on research including children and was approved by the appropriate ethics committee. All study participants gave informed voluntary consent, which was presented in the participants’ native language to avoid ambiguous interpretations. The consent form contained information regarding anonymity, the confidentiality of the interviews, aims and procedure of the research, the methods of storing and analyzing the data and using personal data, disseminating the outcomes, as well as the possible discomfort occurrence and the ways the researcher would avoid, minimalize, or eliminate this possibility.

The analysis of the data followed these steps: meticulous transcription of recordings (voice- to-text), developing and applying codes to all material, identifying themes, patterns, and relationships concerning the created codes, summarizing the data (Saldana 2009). The information was analyzed through thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2006).

The outcomes of the interviews with immigrant children proved the paramount role of the school as both a learning and a socializing institution. The significance of school was highlighted during the COVID-19 lockdown and online learning. Among the issues of distance learning experienced by immigrant children, the following prevailed:

1. Learning issues

   • specialist practices (going to school, mode of learning)

   • everyday practices (daily routine, schedule)

2. Social life issues

   • cultural practices (social contact, visiting cultural places)

The children emphasized that online education had been fairly unsuccessful because of the learning issues related to the disturbances caused to their specialist practices. All respondents stated that they found it difficult to understand the school material while sitting in front of screens. Thus, as the method of learning changed, children had to master new learning practices. Acquiring new skills involved another challenge for the migrant children, who were in the process of getting acquainted with the new norms and rules of educational practices in a host country:

Moreover, after the schools’ shutdown, children were overwhelmed with work, because teachers used the strategy of sending most of the information as homework to save time familiarizing themselves with online tools. For the newcomers, homework took lots of time and effort, as they had to translate the material to their native language, learn it and do the tasks with the help of parents or siblings, and translate it back to Polish. Thus, migrant children had to develop their learning skills, as their educational practices relied on individual work and parents’ support – this effect was compounded during the shutdown: Overloaded with lectures and information, children appeared to have gaps in their knowledge, as some parents could not provide any support. As a result, the new specialist practices led to frustration and demotivation for some migrant children: Nevertheless, two of the student respondents, who had difficulties with comprehending the material at school and were shy to reach a teacher or classmate for help, found distance learning advantageous. At homeschooling, they had more time to check the material on the Internet or consult the adults. Their new learning practices had a positive impact on their psychological well-being and a positive perception of distance education: In a new learning mode, children intertwined their educational and everyday practices with cultural practices, and communication with family members or friends, during ‘school time’. All of the young participants stated that distance learning positively altered their everyday practices as daily routines and schedules were transformed. Thus, the home became a united spatio-temporal entity for performing children's school and home duties: Another challenge of the shutdown concerned the reduced personal meetings, which, consequently, influenced children's social lives, transferring them to the virtual world or making them feel lonely at home. The lack of personal contact with peers led to a change in children's communication practices with both positive (e.g. fast and frequent contact) and negative consequences (e.g. increase of cyberbullying, social exclusion). Virtual communication disturbs the social lives of those who have poor access to information and communication technologies, as well for those whose only source of interaction with peers was the school. Hence, during the shutdown, migrant children valuated school more than before:

The COVID-19 outbreak and school shutdown undoubtedly had an impact on the social practices of school-aged children. Specialist practices were modified by changes to the learning mode and the performance of everyday practices. Moreover, cultural practices moved online, with positive and negative effects. In terms of the structure of social practices, two elements – material (learning mode) and competence (skills to learn through distance) – were reshaped and new between-element links were established. This, consequently, required adjustments to the third element, meaning, (attitude toward school as a learning/teaching and socializing space).

Shove et al. (2012) demonstrated a change in the practice and modification of the links between the practice elements through the example of automobiles replacing horse-drawn carriages: changes to the material element rendered old practices redundant; thus, drivers and mechanics had to acquire new competencies.

This linkage of the elements to of the social practice structure demonstrates that traditional school practices have temporally become ex-practices because the links between the elements were broken. Additionally, they were substituted by the new educational, everyday, and communication practices of children.

Hence, I argue that children who acquired new skills and competences at learning, communicating, managing social relations, and performing everyday practices during the shutdown gave a new meaning to their current educational practices and interpersonal skills. Moreover, homeschooling migrant children stressed the importance of school and face-to-face social life.

Some migrant children realized after the shutdown that personal contacts with teachers and peers lay the ground for a successful learning process. Moreover, during the lockdown, immigrant children gave greater value to the school as a socialization space, where they establish and maintain their social contacts, which often are the only acquaintances in a host country.

Additionally, the schoolchildren's collective practices (Kemmis et al.2014) have been substituted by the separate practices of each child, who had to individually manage the new learning process. Hence, collective educational practices have temporarily become ex-practices (Shove et al. 2012). Thus, children's new individual specialist (learning on distance) and cultural (maintaining social relationships on distance) practices are in the second scenario of the social practice structure (Shove et al. 2012).

Furthermore, the spatio-temporal entities (Schatzki 2005) have changed because of the social practices of schoolchildren and the new arrangements and shift in the three dimensions (semantic space, physical space–time, and social space of shared doing and relations) (Kemmis et al.2014).

To summarize, this study analyzed the changes to the social practices resulted from COVID- 19, particularly the shutdown of public and private institutions. I demonstrated how the links between elements of these practices were established and maintained. Additionally, I disclosed how distance learning shaped students’ values and attitudes toward school and social life. Further research is needed to gain more insights into how different social practices acquired by children, parents, and teachers will develop and be shaped in the future, especially after schools are open and in session again.

Some limitations of the study should be noted. First, the research was conducted using qualitative methods with a group of migrant children in Poland, which does not constitute a representative group of Polish children. However, the study's outcomes were consistent with the findings of Markowska-Manista and Zakrzewska-Olędzka (2020) on the impact of COVID-19 on families in Poland. Second, qualitative research with children using online interview techniques is not yet popular among researchers in Poland. Nonetheless, the study was conducted three months after distance learning started; thus, the children were well-acquainted with the online tools.

Thanks to the reviewers for their thoughtful comments and efforts towards improving my manuscript.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Anzhela Popyk is a PhD candidate at the University SWPS, Warsaw, and a Researcher at SWPS Youth Research Center. Her research focuses on transnational transitions and formation of sense of belonging among migrant children in Poland.