Disrupting the Grammar of Schooling? Covid-19 and the Use of Educational Technologies in Primary Schools in Jerusalem

The transition to technology-mediated remote schooling during Covid-19 forced schools to rely on digital technologies to create new routines and practices, thus potentially disturbing the prevailing grammar of schooling. This offers a unique opportunity to explore how educators perceive and realize educational technologies, and how their use is mediated via socioeconomic, cultural and political differences. Based on semi-structured interviews with principals and teachers in Muslim Palestinian and secular-Jewish primary schools in Jerusalem, we analyze the different uses of the most common technological tools and platforms across schools (WhatsApp, Zoom, and Google Classroom). Our analyses indicate that the affordances of such technologies, as well as their depiction, were not fixed and varied across schools. Namely, we found that lower-SES Palestinian schools, who faced more acute challenges in terms of access, utilized digital technologies to restabilize the familiar grammar of face-to-face schooling in order to monitor and support students and families. In contrast, average-SES Jewish schools focused less on the grammar of schooling and directed more efforts towards temporary solutions centered on students' social and emotional well being.