The Worksheet School: COVID-19 Lockdown and Online Schooling in Public Schools of Delhi.

The COVID-19 pandemic led to the closure of educational institutions across India, which meant that all schooling activities shifted overnight to online platforms. This posed a problem for students from low-income communities who may not have the necessary infrastructure to participate fully in online school. To mitigate this, the Government of Delhi introduced a worksheet based education system for all public schools in the national capital to ensure no student was denied education. This paper discusses a qualitative study conducted between July to December 2020 with grade 10 students from Delhi public schools, their teachers and parents to understand: (1) the effect of a new shared home-school context and (2) the emergence of a ‘Worksheet School’ infrastructure created to facilitate learning and teaching in low-resourced schools. We reveal how the home as a new site for learning affected students’ participation in online school, how the worksheets were re-purposed to support schooling activities and how WhatsApp was used for delivering educational instructions and the fostering of community learning. We discuss implications for equitable access to online learning materials and future work that aims to further study online learning environments in low-resource communities.