Dobryakova M.S., Sivak E.V., Yurchenko O.V. Russia: life, learning and family agency under COVID-19. In: Family Life in the Time of COVID: International perspectives. Twamley, K., Iqbal, H. and Faircloth, C. (eds). London: UCL Press, 2023. P. 97-122.

Abstract

In this chapter we analyse how the life of Russian families with schoolchildren has changed under COVID. Russiaoffers a story of the pandemic in a country with relatively mild and low enforced restrictions. Its only lockdown wascomparatively brief (two months in 2020), and it influenced mostly major cities.We conducted ethnographic observations and online interviews with 38 families from across Russia. The major andpersisting change in family routines was the abrupt switch to home-based schooling – universal for all regions ofRussia – in the middle of March 2020, which, after the summer holidays, for many pupils in Years 6-11 lasted untilwinter 2021.We analyse 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); (2) howthey were able to turn the challenges of the period into an opportunity). We find that parents’ occupation shapestheir responses to and experiences of school closures. Those from non-routine occupational backgrounds engagewith more agentic behaviour in everyday and schooling routines under COVID than those in more routine-basedoccupations. This agentic capacity has made their transition to home-based schooling smoother, and it is this samecapacity which has made families feel more confident under the pandemic. In conclusion we consider some of thelong-term implications of this finding for teaching and learning more generally, as well as the needs of children ofparents in routine-based occupations.IntroductionRussia offers a story of the pandemic in a country with a peculiar combination of nationalfeatures. Geographically, its territory is vast and regional development is uneven—hence thequestion of policy coherence [Zubarevich 2013; Zubarevich & Safronov 2020; Tóth-Czifra 2020;World Bank 2020]. Socio-culturally, it has been under the long shadow of its soviet past—hencethe question of trust and values [e.g. Klicperova-Baker, Kostal 2018, esp. p. 29; Kulin,Meuleman 2015]. Politically, it claims a position of an ambitious and strong internationalplayer--hence an issue for policy choices and vaccine development [Yaffa 2021; World Bank2020]. An interplay of these features underlies the country’ responses to the challenges of thepandemic and should be kept in mind, even though the data we discuss in this chapter are of asmaller scale.To embrace and reconcile these three perspectives at the families’ level, we focus on families’response as they describe it in their actions and attitudes. When selecting participants for oursurvey, we tried to look for representatives of diverse experience: geographically, they comefrom megapolises and small towns from across Russia; socio-culturally, they belong to differenteducational and professional backgrounds. At the same time, we limited the scope of ouranalysis to a specific demographic group—families with schoolchildren. On the one hand, thisnumerous group (there are 16.3 million schoolchildren in Russia) embraces very diverse familiesin terms of their socioeconomic status. On the other hand, learning from home was, according tomany surveys [Kosaretsky et al. 2022], a most painful effect of pandemic unattendedcircumstances for many families, with severe consequences for some [Shmis 2021].It was obvious that families’ experience of home-based learning to a large extent depended ontheir input of ‘hardware”: whether they had enough spare rooms and devices, whether parentshad time to switch between their own paid work and children’s homework (for an overview ofstudents’ conditions and environments for home schooling prior to the crisis see OECD 2020).Yet, we felt that there was something else there, hidden at deeper layers but brought to the forthand exposed by the crisis. The pandemic highlighted the tip of an iceberg of profound changesthat formal schooling is currently undergoing. In this chapter we analyse how the life of Russian families with schoolchildren has changed under COVID. Russiaoffers a story of the pandemic in a country with relatively mild and low enforced restrictions. Its only lockdown wascomparatively brief (two months in 2020), and it influenced mostly major cities.We conducted ethnographic observations and online interviews with 38 families from across Russia. The major andpersisting change in family routines was the abrupt switch to home-based schooling – universal for all regions ofRussia – in the middle of March 2020, which, after the summer holidays, for many pupils in Years 6-11 lasted untilwinter 2021.We analyse 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); (2) howthey were able to turn the challenges of the period into an opportunity). We find that parents’ occupation shapestheir responses to and experiences of school closures. Those from non-routine occupational backgrounds engagewith more agentic behaviour in everyday and schooling routines under COVID than those in more routine-basedoccupations. This agentic capacity has made their transition to home-based schooling smoother, and it is this samecapacity which has made families feel more confident under the pandemic. In conclusion we consider some of thelong-term implications of this finding for teaching and learning more generally, as well as the needs of children ofparents in routine-based occupations.IntroductionRussia offers a story of the pandemic in a country with a peculiar combination of nationalfeatures. Geographically, its territory is vast and regional development is uneven—hence thequestion of policy coherence [Zubarevich 2013; Zubarevich & Safronov 2020; Tóth-Czifra 2020;World Bank 2020]. Socio-culturally, it has been under the long shadow of its soviet past—hencethe question of trust and values [e.g. Klicperova-Baker, Kostal 2018, esp. p. 29; Kulin,Meuleman 2015]. Politically, it claims a position of an ambitious and strong internationalplayer--hence an issue for policy choices and vaccine development [Yaffa 2021; World Bank2020]. An interplay of these features underlies the country’ responses to the challenges of thepandemic and should be kept in mind, even though the data we discuss in this chapter are of asmaller scale.To embrace and reconcile these three perspectives at the families’ level, we focus on families’response as they describe it in their actions and attitudes. When selecting participants for oursurvey, we tried to look for representatives of diverse experience: geographically, they comefrom megapolises and small towns from across Russia; socio-culturally, they belong to differenteducational and professional backgrounds. At the same time, we limited the scope of ouranalysis to a specific demographic group—families with schoolchildren. On the one hand, thisnumerous group (there are 16.3 million schoolchildren in Russia) embraces very diverse familiesin terms of their socioeconomic status. On the other hand, learning from home was, according tomany surveys [Kosaretsky et al. 2022], a most painful effect of pandemic unattendedcircumstances for many families, with severe consequences for some [Shmis 2021].It was obvious that families’ experience of home-based learning to a large extent depended ontheir input of ‘hardware”: whether they had enough spare rooms and devices, whether parentshad time to switch between their own paid work and children’s homework (for an overview ofstudents’ conditions and environments for home schooling prior to the crisis see OECD 2020).Yet, we felt that there was something else there, hidden at deeper layers but brought to the forthand exposed by the crisis. The pandemic highlighted the tip of an iceberg of profound changesthat formal schooling is currently undergoing. 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 lightly 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

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