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The historically high inequities in the education systems of Central and East-European countries have been further exacerbated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using critical frame analysis, we compared the education policy debates in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Republic of Moldova during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic with a particular focus on inequities. We discuss the policy frames proposed and utilized by governmental and non-governmental actors to understand their roles played in articulating policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis, and highlight the specificities and commonalities of the political language within and across the national borders of the four countries. We conclude with our findings on the dynamics and structure of the policy debate between state and non-state actors in times of crisis with a particular focus on policy spaces and policy temporalities. Two ways of constructing spatio-temporalities co-exist: one is national, state and public health centric and focuses on governing ‘through’ the crisis; and the other is focused on long term planning while constructing the crisis as an opportunity for decisive intervention towards more equitable education.

The measures put in place to stop the spread of the Covid-19 have had a major impact on the organization of educational processes. School teachers have been faced with overnight digitalization of their activities without always receiving adequate support with this transition. The present paper reports on a participatory action research project in the form of a tutoring program that sought to understand and respond to these challenges. The project took the form of an open learning initiative addressed to teachers in April – June 2020, followed by a data collection and analysis phase. 37 teachers in four Romanian counties benefited from personalized forms of support offered by 20 student- tutors enrolled in the Educational Sciences Department at the West University in Timişoara. All project activities were carried out at a distance, in the vast majority of cases, online. In analyzing the data produced by the project (tutor reflection log entries, qualitative interviews and focus groups with teachers and tutor students) we seek to answer the following research question: How did a collaborative learning process emerge as part of a participatory action research project carried out during the onset of online teaching and learning practices?. The collaborative learning responded to teachers’ immediate and individual needs regarding the development of digital competences, as well as related to pedagogical and emotional support. Through the tutoring program, the expected roles of the educational actors were reversed: since the undergraduate students were not primarily beneficiaries of the educational processes, but took on an active part as facilitators of the teachers’ learning processes. Thus, a competence transfer from the university to the pre- university environment took place, at a faster rate than it would usually happen.