Project maturation

The project matured with a certain timidity. It was due to objective reasons, the threat of a pandemic, that is one thing. And the other was the ambitious use of methodological transgression, where ambitious quantitative research is interwoven with a thicket of qualitative methods. With the first symptomatic patient, there is a growing sense of danger and, at the same time, an awareness on the part of the researcher that this is 'the moment' to capture in research description, not to miss it, to use one's competences to - in statu nascendi - look at society and its reaction to the plague. My ambitions were wide-ranging, as the flurry of thoughts, insights and inspiring media reports were so compelling that I wanted to investigate "and this... and this... and this". One seemed more valuable than the other. Therefore, it was necessary to select not only the research questions but above all the area of research we would undertake. Parallel to taming myself in the sense of intellectual fever, my environment was increasingly consumed by factual fever, or fever generated by the thought that "I think I have covid". This was absolutely not conducive to research courage; it tamed these urges more than it awakened them. After all, observation was first necessary, frequent and dense reading of reports from the world and from Poland about the spread of the disease, its infectiousness and dynamics, in order to acquire all that was known at a given stage. I had no intention of entering the area of excessive risk, let alone sending members of the planned research team into this area. The team was also formed largely ad hoc, as planned invitations were sometimes refused - understandably - family, personal and situational circumstances were so unexpected and troublesome that invitations to research were often refused. Therefore, the team was lapped up in the course of the developing network of connections that I recreated from previous research and/or collaborations in other fields. Happily, the Team that was formed became, with each research seminar held, more aware of all aspects of the research we were planning and slowly began to implement. The comments of each of them - members of the Team - both those representing the academic world and those who are practitioners, whether in the field of broadly understood socio-psycho-pedagogical help and support, or practitioners from the first line of contact with pupils, created excellent starting material. The first research experiments were already underway in the non-formalised phase of the research (i.e. before the idea was submitted to the Dean of Faculty), when I invited my students (120 people) to write down their accounts of the process of studying remotely and being in a sanitary regime and functioning in a broad aspect during the plague. There was a positive response to this invitation, as - something I had not anticipated - it also acted as an 'emotional vent', a throwing out of excess insecurity, fear, anxiety and 'venom' at what was 'going on around us'. It was also an opportunity (first in writing, later in the form of remote exchange) to articulate our suspicions based on conspiracy theories of the origin of the pandemic, who is behind it and who wants to minimise the human population in this way. However this was not our aim, the phase of such opening to various fantastic concepts and remarks was cleansing and necessary. Besides, it was also inevitable during the seminars of the Research Team.

This phase (the first one) is still the one when schools functioned in the process of traditional teaching, although solutions limiting the attendance of pupils in schools were approaching faster and faster. Therefore, I hastened to several schools to confront the assumed research procedure, methods and tools in practice in collaboration with principals, teachers and young people themselves. I thank the Jan Brzechwa School Complex No. 6 in Przylep near Zielona Góra and the Children of Zamość School Complex in Zwierzyniec on Wieprz, where the research pilot study took place. It took place during the difficult period of trying to "make it" and then entering this phase of learning. For them (the research partners) as well as for us, everything was "uncertain, because it was new" - mainly in the sense of the pandemic context, the transition from traditional to remote learning. Nevertheless, this hardship, which affected both sides together, resulted in a kind of "brotherhood in trouble", as each side knew that it had a task to perform and that it was equally hard for each of them. I would like to emphasise the goodwill of the management of both schools, as well as the fact that they all wanted to get involved and help in the implementation. We will try to tell you how much we got out of it, both here on our website and in many Research Reports, articles and communications.