Learning and teaching amidst and beyond the covid-19 pandemic: sustaining and enhancing students’ solidarity

Abstract

This research aims to explore the issues of learning and teaching online at Russian universities, including during the COVID-19 outbreak. With movement and contacts restricted, all full-time students and all educators had to master new technologies in a very short term, develop special course layouts for remote teaching mode, and cope with the motivational challenges. The methods include but are not limited to content analysis of media publications, domestic regulations, and local normative documents. The concepts of macro-social and group (particularistic) solidarity together with the methodological position of the interplay between solidarity, autonomy, and agency, constitute the original theoretical ground of the research. Comparing in-person, blended, and complete virtual learning modes during COVID-19, the study discusses teachers' work overload, students' acceptance of distant modes of education, and their solidarity when interacting with university administrations and governments. The paper provides a meta-analysis by exploring the impacts of digital transformation and the Covid-2019 outbreak on justice, transparency, agency, and solidarity at universities. The findings show challenges and ways of self-realization of students and teachers in complex socio-economic, psychological, and educational conditions and are of decisive importance for teachers who develop and conduct philosophical disciplines online. Showing systemic shortcomings of the regional educational system, the paper raises our awareness of how emergency situation, political and managerial measures interact with challenges and coping practices of educational and non-educational actors.