A Local Alternative to Global Wholesale Online Schooling during COVID-19: A Phenomenological Single-Case Study of a Standalone School in Bangladesh

Given the shutdown of the schools worldwide thanks to COVID-19 pandemic hit early in 2020, there had been, for a while, a mounting global concern over continuing education and averting children's learning loss. Paying heed to that concern, many nations across the world transitioned to online education as a wholesale alternative approach to emergency schooling. However, online schooling was no single panacea specially for those developing countries which are hardly able to meet the success conditions of online teaching and learning. This phenomenological case study describes a novel pandemic-time rural schooling activity as an alternative to the wholesale online education commonly adopted globally during the pandemic. We have theoretically based the study on the Activity Theories postulated by Vygotsky and Cole and extended by Engestrom. We collected qualitative data by semistructured interviews and by gathering school documents. Following Williams and Moser's coding method and Miles et al.'s two-cycle coding process, we analyzed the collected data. The novel schooling activity that this study found is "clustered (sub-)schools" made up of the split-ups of the regular school. The findings in detail are discussed and recommendations are made.