The aim of this paper is to thoroughly examine how students in Serbia experienced their education through distance learning during the 2020 Spring school closures due to the pandemic. Schoolchildren’s multigenre narratives about learning during school closure were elicited by online surveys; qualitative thematic and values analyses were conducted; and data was further analysed by cluster analysis, ANOVA, and t -tests. A total of 45 lower and upper secondary school students produced 106 narratives providing 429 thought units for analysis. Altogether, 6 themes and 26 value codes were identified. They demonstrate the wide range, complexity, and nuanced positioning of students’ experiences towards the new situation, their role in it, and the role of others i.e. teachers and the technology itself. The paper draws implications on the policy and educational-psychological and methodological level.

In this contemporary world, hyperconnected by migrations and digital media, discourse studies can add important insights about diverse interacting voices. Given increasing contact among individuals, groups, and institutions, understanding discursive interactions across geo-political migration systems requires methodological innovation. This article presents a theory-based research design and analysis of how diverse participants in the process of migration use discourse genres to make sense of displacement and interventions. We illustrate this dynamic narrative inquiry with an activity-meaning system design sampling discourses by diverse participants along the Balkan migration route and an analysis of values salient to them. Animating this method is a study in an education intervention in Serbia, where hundreds of young refugees, arriving from violent displacements in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria attended public schools alongside local peers. This methodology integrates principles of critical discourse analysis to study how displaced youth, their peers, educators, national/international policymakers, and public media used relevant genres to make sense of social inclusion. Analyses of participants' narratives, letters, policies, education guidelines, and news reports yielded 17 values and their dynamic interactions. A discourse-based values analyses revealed echoes across student and institutional expressions (the importance of subjectivity and cultural practices) and diverse group values: migrant students' uses of narratives to emphasize geo-political injustices, Serbian students' emphasis on local cultural practices, and institutional emphases on social inclusion. The study demonstrates the ecological validity of an inquiry sensitive to webs of meaning among diverse actors, adding complexity to social inclusion.

The purpose of the study is to explore the experiences shared by primary school teachers in three waves of data collection. Teachers' narratives about their experiences of schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic were elicited online. In three instances, a total of 116 participants were prompted to narrate in story and letter genres, providing 233 narratives. We conducted the values analysis and additionally analysed data statistically in order to compare the values teachers expressed at three key turning points for education in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic in Serbia. Altogether, three major values and nine value codes were identified. This multi-genre three-wave approach provided a nuanced and comprehensive picture of teachers' most important impressions, concerns, and strategies in the new reality, in particular as the emphasis changed over the course of one year of the pandemic. Teachers who took part in the first wave mostly focused on health and prevention issues, their duties, the workload, and the strategies for coping with the new normal. In the second wave, as the threat eased, teachers expressed increased awareness of schooling related issues. Teachers' narratives in the third wave primarily focused on the learning process and outcomes. Based on the conducted analyses, the paper draws policy recommendations.

This paper aims to help understand how relational trust between students and teachers embedded in the teaching-learning process unfolded during the emergency distance and flexible hybrid education in Serbia in 2020. It also identifies niches in student-teacher relationships that hold potential for repairing and building trust. For the student-teacher relationship to be trust-based and thus conducive to students’ learning and wellbeing, a consensus about role expectations must be achieved. As the Covid-19 crisis interrupted schooling and education, participants faced uncertainties and ambiguities in role enactment, and the cornerstones of relational trust were disrupted. In an effort to understand 1) the context in which trust was challenged, 2) the ways in which trust was disrupted, and 3) the opportunities for its restoration, we relied on a multi-genre dynamic storytelling approach to data collection and values analysis for data processing. A total of 136 students and 117 teachers from 22 schools wrote 581 narratives in three genres: stories, letters and requests. The analysis yielded 22 codes that allowed further understanding of how changes in structural and institutional conditions affected both students’ and teachers’ expectations of each other, and how incongruence of these expectations fed into feelings of helplessness for both students and teachers, disengagement from learning for students, and heavy workload and poor performance for teachers. In addition, the narratives account for positive outcomes when these expectations were met, and for opportunities for trust-building if students’ and teachers’ perspectives are brought to each other’s attention and negotiated locally. Finally, recommendations for restoring trust are given.