LAUSR

In this piece we reflect upon the swift integration of online communication technologies in schools in Israel during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the years, educational authorities in Israel expressed concern over children’s use of online media and were reluctant to admit online communication, and especially social media, into schools. A Director General’s Circular published by the Ministry of Education in 2011, which is still officially binding, constructs the blurred boundaries between teachers, students and parents in online communication as a challenge to school hierarchies. It thus recommends that teachers use caution when publishing on social media, and instructs them to refrain from interacting with students and parents online, particularly in group contexts. This suspicion toward and abstinence from mediated communication may be seen to underlie the failure of a national online learning drill, which the Ministry of Education conducted in the first days of March 2020. Despite this failure, two weeks later the severity of the pandemic led the Ministry to shut down schools and authorize a general transition to online learning. This radical conversion was performed mostly in local settings as headmasters, teachers, students, and parents had to invent and to adjust almost overnight to mediated communicative practices. In this commentary, we explore the discourse of explanation and justification through which schools sought to make sense of this transition. Specifically, we ask how schools used social media to articulate new forms of relationship and to account for the sudden incorporation of online communication into everyday school life. We draw on a selection from a corpus of vernacular school-related video productions, which were uploaded and are publicly accessible on social media. The videos may be seen as bottom-up multi-modal texts that are inspired by popular online styles and genres. Although varied in their foci and concerns (spanning from March to September 2020), we argue that the videos share an upbeat rhetoric that reframes the crisis as an opportunity and disregards the enabling – and inhibiting – affordances of communication technologies in education. Our starting point is a minute-long video that was uploaded to Facebook days before the beginning of the school year. Addressing the students of Ethan middle-high school using verbal and visual PR tropes, it presents energetic teachers, eager to reunite with their students, embracing the changes that the school year is about to usher in. The video begins