From Learning during the Pandemic to Learning the Pandemic: Coping Strategies in Official Materials of Leading Russian and World Universities

Abstract

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has become an exogenous factor in relation to many aspects of higher education. Still, it needs to be more evident for which of them the impact of the pandemic caused the emergence of fundamentally new phenomena and in which it strengthened already emerging processes (for example, digitalization) or even consolidated the existing modes of action, slowing down their changes. The differentiation of these three categories is the purpose of this study. It was implemented by means of discourse analysis of pandemic-related materials posted on the websites of 100 leading Russian universities according to the Forbes rating and 100 leading world universities according to the Times Higher Education rating. The results indicate that the dominant coping strategy throughout the pandemic has been the appeal to the university’s collective identity. At an early stage of the pandemic, this coping strategy took the form of an emotional appeal to the image of the community of a particular university as a resource of mutual support based on a common understanding of what is happening.

In some cases, this general coping strategy and specific techniques that were explicitly offered to students and university staff were built into the university’s identity, already formed by that time, with its symbolic attributes and meaningful characteristics. Then, as the pandemic became a new reality and built up its history, this emotionally charged actualization of the identity of a particular university was replaced by an emphatically academic, emotionally detached reflection on the changes that the pandemic caused in the university and the higher education system as a whole. Thus, learning during the pandemic is being replaced by learning the pandemic. Both are associated with strengthening the collective identities of individual universities and higher education as a social institution, in contrast to the pre-pandemic discourse about its crisis.

Acknowledgements. This work is an output of a research project implemented as a part of the Basic Research Program at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE University).