Rurality and the “New” Post-COVID-19 Pandemic Education Culture: Facilitating and Inhibiting Resilience Factors of Academic Performance among Learners from Low Socio-Economic Status Backgrounds in Rural Uganda

Abstract

While school closures may have been necessary to reduce the transmission of COVID-19 in many contexts, the full impact of such closures varied among different demographics of learners. Those from the culture of rurality characterized by low socioeconomic-status family backgrounds endured more severe negative consequences than their counterparts from better socioeconomic family backgrounds. Despite these challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, many learners from the culture of rurality exhibited resilience and have been able to exhibit formidable academic performance after the lockdown was lifted. In this chapter, we discuss the resilience factors that facilitated and inhibited the academic performance and hence academic progress of the students. We argue that differences in religious background, parenting, orphanhood, societal setting and culture, age, and sex were responsible for the success or failure in resilience to perform academically beyond the pandemic. We offer explored strategies including extended orientation, use of educational technologies, and e-mentoring, among others, as avenues to foster further academic performance and continuity of education among the students.

1. Introduction

An edge in today’s global economy can be found in a nation’s higher education system, which also produces the human capital necessary for the nation’s social and economic development. This advantage can be found in a nation’s ability to compete globally [1]. Higher education has the potential to make a contribution to the solution of environmental, social, and economic problems, provided that research is given sufficient priority and funding.

According to Nshemereirwe [1], Africa has the weakest higher education system in the world. Inadequate finance, low research output, and problems with human capital development and retention characterize the system. Many pre-university and university-level courses are frequently out of date and outmoded, and accompanying quality assurance systems are severely inadequate. In addition, many learners in Africa come from underprivileged backgrounds and are largely barred from fully participating in education and society. Therefore, it is apparent that there is a problem of unequal access to higher education in Africa in general and Uganda in particular. The rise of COVID-19 increased access disparities to higher education.

The COVID-19 outbreak disrupted education systems in most countries, reducing educational opportunities for many learners, especially for the underprivileged, the excluded, and those with impairments [2]. There is substantial evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic has had a considerable impact on people’s ability to learn, remember what they learn, and attain their global objectives. The widespread shutdown of schools has negatively affected the quality of education as a whole [3]. According to studies, prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, 258 million children were denied the legal right to education. Due to the pandemic, millions of people were at risk of losing their right to education [4]. Due to COVID-19, schools around the world were forced to close, forcing nearly 1.2 billion children to vacate their classrooms [4, 5]. Consequently, it is evident that the outbreak made it more difficult to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4). This caused the most disadvantaged children and adolescents, especially those who already resided in unsafe locations, to fall further behind their peers who were in safer areas. At the height of the pandemic, schools, universities, and other educational institutions were forced to close, affecting about 90% of students [4].

In many cases, it may have been necessary to close educational institutions in order to stop the spread of COVID-19, but the effects of these closures on the learners enrolled in these institutions varied widely. Those from the culture of rurality characterized by disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds were confronted with more difficult situations than their more fortunate counterparts [6]. Incidentally, research indicates that 80% of school-aged children and adolescents in Uganda reside in rural regions and lack access to fundamental resources [1]. The majority of them lacked access to a high-quality education supported by digital technology and infrastructure during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Regular classes were disturbed, and as a result, many learners including those in higher education institutions lost interest in learning. Many, especially female students, were compelled to undertake risky and illegal sexual interactions for financial assistance, leading to an increase in teen pregnancy and dropout rates, not ruling out possibilities of contracting sexually transmitted infections.

Despite these challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, many learners from the culture of rurality seemed to exhibit resilience and were able to continue and perform formidably in their education after the lockdown was lifted. In this chapter, we discuss the resilience factors that facilitated and inhibited the academic performance of the students. We argue that differences in religious background, parenting, orphanhood, societal setting and culture, age, and sex were responsible for the success or failure in resilience to forge ahead and perform in education beyond the pandemic. We offer explored strategies including extended orientation, use of educational technologies, and e-mentoring as avenues to foster continuity of education and hence enhance academic performance among the students. The chapter, beyond this introduction, considers the following sections: a theoretical framework; socioeconomic status and education access; impact of COVID-19 on learner engagement; facilitating factors of rural education access and success post-COVID-19; inhibiting factors of rural education access and success post-COVID-19; strategies for enhancing access, retention, and success of rural learners post-COVID-19; and a conclusion. In the following section, we discuss the theories that offer a plausible explanation of the phenomena of rurality and inequality of opportunity.

2. Theoretical framework to examine rurality and educational access, retention, and success

Many governments internationally have taken bold steps to improve the socioeconomic statuses of their citizens. Initiatives geared in this direction in Uganda include widening access to basic education through programs such as Universal Primary Education (UPE) as well as central government and district quota sponsorships for bachelor’s degree programs. However, despite these pockets of initiatives, inequality of opportunity in access to education still visibly pervades many sections of Ugandan societies, especially those defined by cultures of rurality [1]. A theoretical understanding of such scenarios can be offered by John Locke’s egalitarian paradigm [7], inequality of opportunity theory [8], and the attribution theory [9]. Each of these is separately considered below with a focus on enhancing the academic performance of learners from rurality cultures.

2.1 Egalitarian paradigm

According to Pogge [10], the current international system creates international social and economic inequalities and does not give nearly equal opportunities for members of different societies to influence transnational political decisions that affect their lives. It also does not give nearly equal opportunities for equally talented and motivated people to obtain a good education and professional position regardless of the society in which they were born. This holds true for the Ugandan society. According to Hausman and Waldren [11], the suffering, humiliation, powerlessness, debasement, and forced servitude of the poor are sufficient grounds for opposing economic disparities. It is crucial to combat educational gaps due to their harmful impact on people’s freedom, intelligence, and empathy, which subsequently invite healthcare disparities resulting in the suffering and diminished quality of life that individuals experience.

In order to ensure that people of all economic and social backgrounds have nearly the same possibilities to obtain political office and influence the political decisions that shape their lives, Rawls [12] advocates the egalitarian paradigm to nurture justice and fairness of political liberty. The paradigm also implies the notion of fairness, which calls for institutions to guarantee fair equality of opportunity so that all people, regardless of their background, have about the same chances to succeed academically and professionally. Also, the paradigm requires that the greatest good of those at the bottom of social or economic inequality be considered while designing social structures.

Pogge [10] asserts that the egalitarian worldview must overcome four key obstacles: (a) demonstrating that inequalities are bad or unjust in and of themselves, regardless of how they affect other moral considerations; (b) identifying which inequalities are objectionable and why; (c) identifying what individuals are responsible for and the extent to which individual responsibility justifies particular inequalities; and (d) demonstrating how to strike a fair balance between specific inequalities and other moral considerations. In Uganda, differences in welfare, resources, opportunities, and capacities between religious, ethnic, and geographical groups are presumptively unjust because they are frequently not the result of individual actions. In addition, policymakers have better access to information about inequalities between groups than between individuals; hence, it is easier to implement social policies to alleviate inequalities between groups than between individuals. Egalitarians prefer to focus on inequalities between groups, even when inequality at the individual level is their major concern. This encourages the application of the Inequality of Opportunity Theory to the study of the effect of rurality on educational access and academic achievement.

2.2 Inequality of opportunity theory

Inequality of opportunity at the level of the individual is frequently caused by factors for which the individual cannot be held accountable. In this case, being born involuntarily in a rural area confers burdens of association with rurality on learners for which they are not responsible. Roemer and Trannoy [13] suggest that equality of opportunity must be observed, in which individuals expending the same effort are entitled to the same outcome, and any discrepancy resulting from uncontrollable conditions must be eliminated. In light of this, we contend that it is unfair and unjust for learners from rural areas in Uganda to experience inaccessibility and drop out of school due to their geographical, cultural, and therefore economic differences, which hinder them from accessing quality educational services, especially as exacerbated by COVID-19. Instead, the fair and just thing to do is to advocate for and foster political, social, economic, educational, health, and all-round equality of opportunity for all citizens regardless of their background. Only then can a good academic performance of learners from the background of rurality be guaranteed.

2.3 Attribution theory

Attribution Theory [14] is the basic paradigm for explaining how individuals attribute causes to events and behaviors. According to the theory, attribution can be internal if individuals believe an event is caused by their own attributes or emotions, or external if they believe the event is caused by uncontrollable situational factors. According to Weiner [14], there are two key factors in forming attributions: unexpected (as opposed to expected) events and the failure to accomplish a goal. Oliver and DeSarbo [15] argue that outcomes that can be interpreted as successes or failures (e.g., good and bad) generate causality inferences along three dimensions: (a) locus, (b) stability, and (c) controllability. Locus refers to the internal or external location of a cause; stability refers to the temporal nature of a cause, which can range from stable (permanent) to unstable (temporary); and controllability refers to the degree to which a cause can be influenced by choice. Learners from rural areas are likely to attribute their own failure to access and perform in education to rurality—characterized by low distribution of educational technologies required during the COVID-19 pandemic, which is regarded as external to the learner, stable, and uncontrollable. Learners who see their academic life experiences as failures have a tendency to overemphasize the significance of their rurality circumstances that are beyond their control, attributing their inaccessibility and likely academic underperformance and dropout to rurality-related inequity of opportunity. In the following section is presented a discussion of the relationship between socioeconomic status and educational access and academic performance.

3. Rurality, socioeconomic status, and educational access and success during COVID-19 and beyond

Nicola et al. [16] highlight a range of factors that influence students’ success in remote learning and teaching. These include socioeconomic status (SES), availability of information technology (IT) infrastructure, availability of IT tools and their quality, and feedback, assistance, and support for online learning, among others. Similarly, Nshemereirwe [1] observes that successful educational performance is dependent on SES. Learners from low-SES households attending rural schools that mainly offer free education programs of UPE and USE perform characteristically far below their counterparts from higher-SES households and schools in urban settings. Socioeconomic status comprises levels of education, financial stability, and self-perception of social and economic standing in addition to income. It is related not only with a person’s standard of living but also with their opportunities and advantages in life’s most vital domains such as their level of success in school, health, and job and their ability to access social services.

Low SES levels are typically associated with greater rurality and has varied consequences on the educational experiences of learners. In places with low SES, school systems are usually under-resourced, which has a substantial negative impact on the academic progress and outcomes of students. Nshemereirwe [1] decries the deplorable educational access and success rates in Africa, with under 60% of the learners who complete primary school joining secondary school, and of those, only 35% joining university at the end of high school. Nshemereirwe further avers that participation in higher education on the African continent rates the lowest in the world, averaging at around 7% of the relevant age cohort. Accordingly, a disproportionately minute fraction of higher education students comes from the higher socioeconomic stratum of society. According to Cuisia-Villanueva et al. [17] and Morgan et al. [18], learners from low-SES households and communities acquire academic skills at a slower rate than those from higher-SES backgrounds. This, according to Bradley et al. [19], is due to the fact that disadvantaged households have limited access to learning materials that foster a conducive atmosphere for literacy.

Nicola et al. [15] note that COVID-19 grossly affected educational access and success in significant ways, especially for learners from low-income families mainly in rural settings. Such learners experienced hampered social mobility, as schools no longer provided free school meals for children from low-income families; social isolation; increased school drop-out rates; and childcare costs for families with young children. Gaidelys et al. [4] observe that COVID-19 generally caused learning losses (poorer learning outcomes), which was more pronounced among learners from characteristically rural places of residence with low SES households. Such households could not afford to spend the additional expenditure required for securing the infrastructure necessary for online and distance learning and tutoring services. Due to lack of study rooms and online tools, students from rural communities spent less time learning at home during the COVID-19 lockdown [20]. Such a scenario, as argued by Aikens and Barbarin [21], was a recipe for poor academic performance in cognitive, language, and memory development; socioemotional processing; and, consequently, poor adult income and health.

According to Buckingham et al. [22], learners from low-SES families are less likely to have experiences that encourage the development of fundamental skills of reading acquisition, such as phonological awareness, vocabulary, and oral language. Inadequate education and subsequent increased dropout rates affect learners’ academic achievement, perpetuating the low-SES status of the community. Studies by Aikens and Barbarin [21] as well as Bergen et al. [23] indicate that learners’ initial reading competency is correlated with the home literacy environment, number of books owned, and parent distress. Bradley et al. [19] and Orr [24] note that low-SES households have less access to learning materials and experiences, including books, computers, stimulating toys, skill-building lessons, or tutors to create a positive literacy environment, which was the case during the COVID-19 pandemic.

From the facts above, it can be concluded that learners from low-SES rural backgrounds were less likely to have access to educational resources during the COVID-19 lockdown. Having depended nearly entirely on school and classroom environments for education acquisition, the prevalence of COVID-19 most likely set a precedence for lower academic achievement and slower rates of academic progress among learners from the low-SES rural backgrounds as compared with those from higher-SES communities. Nshemereirwe [1] argues that the gap in educational achievement and progress is expected to be worse in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines.

By implication, stakeholders of the national education system should brace themselves for a rise in learning disabilities including inattention, disinterest, and lack of cooperation [18, 25]; negative psychological and mental health manifested as addiction, homelessness, childcare, chronic illness, emotional distress/depression, and disabilities [26]; and employment disparity by rurality, with graduates from low-SES rural settings being more highly disadvantaged than their high-SES counterparts. Gaidelys et al. [4] similarly noted that learners in mainstream schools suffered from psychological deterioration (aggressive behavior, depressive moods, despair about academic underachievement, etc.) when governments implemented lockdown and other measures to manage the COVID-19 pandemic. The remote teaching and learning that ensued resulted in a lack of knowledge in individual subjects, a deterioration in physical conditions (spinal problems, visual impairment, insufficient muscle development), and the development of specific illnesses related to low physical activity.

Despite some students’ being able to adapt reasonably well to online teaching and learning, others were negatively impacted due to the lack of communication with fellow students. This was more severe for learners with special needs. Raghu [27] observed that special education teachers working with learners with learning disabilities did not receive any specific technological support for their education during the COVID-19 pandemic. The learners with special needs did not have learning environments adapted to them. Their plight will most likely endure post-COVID-19.

The post-COVID-19 access to education is expected to continue being plagued by the effects of the COVID-19 prevention measures including school quarantine, which adversely affected learners’ knowledge, social skills, socialization, and psychological and physical health [4]. From the foregoing section, it is noteworthy that learners from rural and hence low-SES settings faced greater challenges in accessing education during the pandemic, particularly due to the fact that they could not afford the resources such as hardware and software technologies to support online learning. Yet, education provision post-COVID-19 is expected to trend more toward online teaching and learning. However, as noted by Cuisia-Villanueva et al. [17], many of the rural-based learners will struggle to cope with educational access and success because of their apparent lack of access to technology. Due to digital inequality, only the privileged can continue their education without being compromised [28]. As feared by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) [29], vulnerable learners from rural settings will lag farthest behind in digital readiness, and the education gap will keep expanding, even at higher education institutions including universities.

Abuhammad [30] as well as Mukuna and Aloka [31] identified a cohort of issues that parents perceived as barriers to distance learning during COVID-19 for all categories of learners including university students. These include personal level barriers such as lack of training and support, lack of technical knowledge, lack of communication with professionals and lack of qualifications; technical barriers such as insufficient computer equipment and maintenance investment and poor Internet connection; logistical barriers of lack of preparation of the students, dissatisfaction with distance learning, the students’ learning needs not being met during distance learning, and lack of flexibility; and financial barriers including the inability to buy appropriate technology for distance learning and the inability to pay for Internet services. These challenges have not disappeared and are expected to linger around and significantly affect educational access and success more severely among low-SES rural learners. Therefore, factoring in the prevalence of COVID-19, it can be concluded that educational access and success was more severely impacted for learners from rural low-SES backgrounds, and more so for learners with disabilities. The educational access and success of low-SES learners is likely to continue being hampered post-COVID-19 in the face of rurality. However, the following strategies can be employed to enhance the unique trait of resilience for educational access and success among the rural-based vulnerable learners in Uganda post-COVID-19.

4. Enhancing educational access and success of rurality-characterized learners post-COVID-19

According to Costin and Coutinho [32], the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated and will continue to exacerbate historical disparities such as educational barriers. The effects of COVID-19 were largely deleterious for educational access and success among learners characterized by rurality. However, the general silver lining of the pandemic on the social literacy skills of elementary school learners may include improved teacher–learner–family relationship, increased proficiency in the use of IT tools, enhanced communication, listening, and active participation skills among the learners. In this section, we present formidable strategies from previous studies, relevant to the Ugandan context, that could be employed to enhance educational access and success among rurality-characterized learners in the post-COVID-19 era.

Muijs et al. [33] proffer a number of suitable strategies for the provision of education in low-SES contexts in the aftermath of the pandemic. These include improving teaching and learning, creating an information-rich environment, building a learning community, continuous professional development, involvement of parents, and increased funding and resources. Gaidelys et al. [4] opines that the COVID-19 pandemic and distance learning have become synonymous in the education system. In this case, the provision of education in the post-COVID-19 era must assume a mainly online character, supported by access to fast and reliable internet, the right technologies, and skills of using the Internet and technologies. To meet the socioeconomic demands of the learners in rural contexts, the Internet and online platforms used for teaching and learning such as Google Classroom, Google Hangouts, Skype, Facebook groups, Messenger, and Zoom [34] need to be highly subsidized for ease of affordability by the learners and parents of low-SES households. This is possible if the local authorities make a deliberate effort to lobby from the government and other non-governmental organizations to provide the required facilities and infrastructure.

To close the inequality of opportunity gaps and enhance learners’ resilience, Gaidelys [4] and Roemer and Trannoy [13] advocate for improving school systems and early intervention programs. One strategy of achieving this is to step up research on rurality, SES, and education. Marchant et al. [35] propose prioritizing the health and well-being of students and staff; focusing on empowering parents to help their children; improving the digital competencies of students and teachers; considering smaller class sizes and additional staff; and improving the communication mechanism between the schools and families and between the government and the schools. Collaboration with homes is expected to close the educational gap that might occur [17] by fostering home learning, which would significantly improve the ability of the rural learners to tackle issues in the absence of negative competition from their urban counterparts.

With specific reference to the provision of reliable internet infrastructure and user-friendly learning tools and devices, Gaidelys et al. [4] entreat schools to test, evaluate, and increase the internet bandwidth to support synchronous and asynchronous online teaching and learning through, for instance, video conferencing and accessing digital learning resources, respectively. The selection of appropriate learning tools is paramount for learners of rural backgrounds to find and process information, construct knowledge, and collaborate with peers. Their new exposure to such facilities might be distractive instead if not well proctored. The tools ought to be user-friendly and fast enough to enable educators to create and manage resources, publish messages, and manage learner activities during lessons; enable learners to participate effectively in learning activities; enable teachers and learners to communicate in real time; and help teachers, parents, and school communities to effectively collaborate in student learning engagements. The bottom-line in effecting this strategy is ensuring affordability of the internet infrastructure and the learning tools in addition to appropriate guidance on doing academic work in cyber space.

Marchant et al. [35] advocates for well-prepared teaching and learning resources, effective teaching and learning methods, effective support for teachers and students, and cooperation between schools and public authorities. Given the low-SES origins of the students in question, it is important to make a careful consideration of the various interactive strategies for achieving constructivist-based lessons. Adequate contextualized support services are required of the government (central and local), schools, families, and the general public for teachers and learners to maximize the choice and use of appropriate learning resources and convenient learning tools and promote interactive learning methods. This support could come in the form of specific training and professional development for teachers and parents on the use of technology and software, procurement of appropriate technology for teaching and learning for all learners, integration of interactive approaches to learning at home, individual guidance and counseling to meet the psychosocial needs of learners and teachers, and provision of internet and other learning resources. There is also the need to ensure effective policy implementation to support teaching and learning, especially with regard to ensuring that all the diversity of learners is afforded inclusive and equal learning opportunities as well as resilience to tackle any existing gaps in their educational pursuits.

Partnerships, collaboration, and networking [35] have been proposed as strategies to consult and receive support from the founding institutions and cooperate with other educational institutions. These strategies are aimed at sharing best practices to generate workable solutions from experts in the face of crises and to adjust school activities to suit the context of rurality. Such support is anticipated to heighten the level of achievement goal setting and employment of growth mindsets to endure any challenging situations in the process of educational pursuits.

Costin and Coutinho [32] suggest engaging psychologists in schools as a strategy to assist educational institutions in becoming “trauma-informed schools” [36] by facilitating the identification of shared and individual trauma and laying an emphasis on community recovery. As learners and teachers return to school and begin to experience the long-term effects of COVID-19-related traumas, this strategy is essential for mitigation and restoration, particularly among the most vulnerable rural segments of society. During the pandemic, many learner populations across many dimensions of diversity may have encountered and acquired various types of traumas, such as trauma associated with marital violence. In a post-pandemic world, designing and evaluating curricula and other interventions to transform schools into communities of healing and trauma-informed institutions may be crucial for learners and teachers in the face of tribalism, sexism, and ableism, in order to build socially just societies in Uganda, and democracies in the world.

5. Conclusion

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education access and success highly depended on factors of rurality including whether a household had enough food, how stressful it was to live in an uncertain environment, and whether the household had the knowledge, resources, or time to help learners succeed in school. During the pandemic, the access and success in continued education programs again highly depended on the level of rurality and socioeconomic status of the learners and parents. The pandemic undoubtedly aggravated the poverty and inequality levels in most countries including Uganda. In the aftermath of the pandemic, the combination of these two factors is likely to make it more difficult for people of all socioeconomic classes to access and successfully complete their formal education. It can be concluded that disparities in religious background, parenting, orphanhood, societal setting, culture, age, and sex will continue to impact learners’ success or failure in resilience to forge ahead and perform in education beyond the pandemic. Given that the purpose of education is to eliminate inequality of opportunity caused by socioeconomic disparities, the strategies provided in this chapter can be employed to overcome the rurality factors of socioeconomic imbalance and enhance learners’ resilience for educational access and academic success, especially for learners from rural backgrounds in Uganda.