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Paper short abstract

Based on a nationwide survey of 421 Moroccan teachers, this paper shows how students created peer-to-peer online study circles during COVID-19 school closures, revealing everyday civic activism interpreted through digital folklore and youth subculture theory within Morocco’s Global South context.

Paper long abstract

March 2020 marks the month when Morocco closed schools and millions of students and teachers had to switch to online education overnight. This paper is based on a nationwide survey of 421 teachers. It lays out the structural and socio-economic challenges, such as unreliable internet, high costs, and lack of training that affected that transition.

Despite the aforementioned barriers, teachers remarked that Moroccan students quickly formed informal study groups and created new ways to communicate in order to continue learning. Interpreted through the lenses of digital folklore and youth subculture theory, these emergent practices constitute a vernacular digital culture that initiated the recreation of Morocco’s longstanding oral and communal study traditions into a virtual format.

Rather than outward protest, these adaptive forms of cooperation represent an everyday civic activism: a subtle yet impactful way for Moroccan young people to sustain education and assert agency despite limited infrastructure and institutional support.

By bringing folklore and youth-culture perspectives to a large empirical dataset, this paper positions Morocco as an under-examined Global South case where crisis schooling became a site of cultural production and subtle political participation. It broadens understandings of how educational disruptions can foster creative, socially significant digital folklore and extend the concept of political engagement beyond conventional activism.