Energetic Students, Stressed Parents, and Nervous Teachers: A Comprehensive Exploration of Inclusive Homeschooling During the COVID-19 Crisis

Abstract

March 2020 will be reminded as the time when schools around the world came to a shutdown. This resulted in a necessary and immediate redesign of teaching and learning. School-based instruction had to be replaced by a home-based instruction format. This required students, parents and teachers to adapt their daily routines to a new and unknown educational reality. Given this unprecedented situation, research into the impact of homeschooling during the COVID-19 crisis became urgent. This brief report introduces a nation-wide research project in Germany. Following a mixed-methods design, the SCHELLE project titled Student-Parents-Teachers in Homeschooling (abbreviated as SCHELLE following its German name Schüler-Eltern-Lehrer) was developed in order to comprehensively explore students’, parents’, and teachers’ experiences during homeschooling. Overall, the studies focused on collecting quantitative and qualitative data on how homeschooling was implemented, whether inclusive education was considered, and the well-being of all three perspectives. The main findings of the SCHELLE project revealed that the impact of homeschooling expanded not only into the educational domain, but as well into the social (e.g. social distancing), psychological (positive and negative activation), and educational equality matters (implementation of inclusive education).

Keywords

• inclusive homeschooling
• mixed methods design
• coronavirus
• emergency remote education