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Russia: life, learning and family agency under COVID-19
In this chapter we analyse how the life of Russian families with schoolchildren changed under COVID-19. Russia offers a story of the pandemic in a country with relatively mild and low enforced restrictions. Its only lockdown was comparatively brief (two months in 2020), and mostly affected major cities. We conducted ethnographically oriented observations and online interviews with 38 families from across Russia. The major and persisting change in family routines was the abrupt switch to home-based schooling – universal for all regions of Russia – in the middle of March 2020, which, after the summer holidays, for many pupils in Years 5−9 lasted until winter 2021.
We analysed families’ behaviour in the context of the pandemic with a special focus on their instances of agency: (1) how people acted in different situations (which restrictions they complied with and which they ignored) and (2) how they were able to turn the challenges of the period into an opportunity. We found that parents’ occupation shapes their responses to and experiences of school closures. Those from non-routine professional backgrounds engaged with more agentic behaviour in everyday and schooling routines under COVID-19 than those in more routine-based occupations.1 Those engaged in non-routine professions had more room to exercise agency in their jobs and they had a higher agentic capacity. It made their transition to home-based schooling smoother, and it is this same capacity which made families feel more confident under the pandemic. In conclusion we consider some of the long-term implications of this finding for teaching and learning more generally, as well as the needs of children of parents in routine-based occupations.