ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on pesantren communities. Pesantrens are Islamic boarding schools, where education is done through face-to-face interaction between students and teachers. The rapid spread of COVID-19 placed pressure on this educational tradition, which is characterised by limited technological capacity, to send students home to prevent the spread of the virus. As they struggled to implement online learning, pesantrens faced major technological, financial and pedagogical challenges. These encouraged some to maintain face-to-face learning, even during the second wave of the pandemic. This chapter explores the resilience of pesantren leaders in the face of the pandemic and shows how they tended to be strategic and courageous, especially regarding networking, resources and management, as well as both independent and collaborative. A key finding is that the persistence of face-to-face learning in some pesantrens during the pandemic was mainly the result of financial constraints, rather than radical beliefs that deny the existence of COVID-19. Pesantrens depend heavily on students' tuition fees to fund operational costs and this forced them to live dangerously during the pandemic, while also working on practical ways to handle the threats it posed.
