“Fold the Eggs … Fold the Eggs … ”: Experiences of Educational Stakeholders During COVID-19

As the world experienced the COVID-19 outbreak, education was one of the multiple systems that were hit hard. We explored the consequences of the reconfiguration of schooling based on the experiences of the educational stakeholders caught up in the sudden transition to virtual schooling during COVID-19. Using Bronfenbrenner’s (1976) Ecological Systems framework, we underscored the complexity of the individual’s socio-cultural world and the myriad influences that impact the individual’s growth to examine how agents involved in the educational system have dealt with this unanticipated crisis academically, personally, socially, and emotionally. People can endorse contradictory positions on the same policy. Recognizing that multiplicity of voices might bring a different perspective, we captured various voices—an administrator leading the teachers’ professional development, a public-school elementary teacher, and a parent with two kids. Using unstructured interviews, we unpacked the narratives and counter-narratives of the participants to unpack “what worked” and “what did not work” during virtual learning and teaching environment. The voices centered in this article offer a rich source of insight into challenges faced by those who are at the forefront of the educational crisis—teachers and parents. The results showed how various communities cooperated to deal with such unprecedented times while maintaining the responsibility of educating children. The key trends that emerged from our qualitative investigation were: 1) development of collaboration among teachers as they transitioned into virtual teaching, 2) flexibility of the school leaders to assist the teachers in this new instructional modality, and 3) parents’ acknowledgment of the teachers’ efforts to assist their children.

“Mi Hijo es lo Principal” – Guatemalan Mothers Navigate the COVID-19 Pandemic

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, motherwork has increased. Mothers, including in Guatemala, have taken on expanded responsibilities of virtual schooling and keeping the family safe and healthy, in addition to prepandemic familial and professional contributions. Twelve Guatemalan mothers of children under age 7 were interviewed about how they negotiated the pandemic; data were coded using thematic analysis and consensual qualitative research frameworks. Analysis revealed six themes: daily stressors, fostering children's development, implementing coping strategies, utilizing technology, establishing closer relationships, and achieving personal and occupational growth. Guatemalan mothers tapped into existing ideologies of motherhood, relied on traditional values of Guatemalan culture – faith, family, and gratitude – prioritized their children's well-being, and found unexpected benefits. Social policies that specifically address women's conditions, agency, and strengths could forward achievement of Sustainable Development Goal 5, Gender Equality, in Guatemala.

From virtual to participatory learning with technology during COVID-19

During COVID-19, schools around the world rapidly went online. Examining youth technology use reveals sharp inequities within the United States’ education system and incongruencies between the technologies used in virtual schooling and those in the lives of students outside of school. In affluent communities, virtual schooling is supported by a distributed schooling infrastructure that coordinates students’ knowledge work. This home and school technology infrastructure features material, human, and structural capital that facilitates youth development as nascent knowledge workers. Technology use during virtual schooling keeps youth activity grounded within the “walls” of school; during virtual schooling, students have little voice in setting learning goals or contributing “content.” Technology use at home for learning or entertainment stems from their own goals and features them as active inquisitors seeking out information and extending their social networks, and crucially, using participatory learning technologies such as Discord for communications. An extended period of virtual schooling could enable a rethinking of the role of technology in schools, including an embrace of play, emotional design, participatory communications, place-based learning, embodied understandings, and creative construction.

Virtual Schooling: Issues And Challenges During Pandemic

Virtual schooling is a participation between The Centre for Teaching and Learning (CTL) by means of different apparatuses, practices such as web-based platforms, tools, devices, video conferencing software, discussion boards to help and motivate students and educators to fill the gap of physical classroom. Virtual Schooling is inseparable from e-learning, happens on the web. Here, students and educators interact in synchronous where students interact or engage with educators while they convey their lessons live, or asynchronous, where students watch recording of the lessons later anytime. This Paper is exploratory in nature, data is collected with primary source like questionnaire and respondent are a total of 66 teachers and 65 students of schools in Lucknow city. Though virtual schooling can happen in multiple and distributed location but at the same time it is significantly more complicated than most expect. The difficulties engaged with virtual schooling might appear to be too various to even think about counting. Commonly found challenges on behalf of educators and students are: multitasking, requests advanced prestidigitate qualities which is inevitable, yet exhausting; quality of teaching resources; volume of work, remote teaching includes a bigger workload than traditional classroom teaching. The volume of assignments, design and plan the lessons and emails to answer can astonish you; time management skills are a continuous issue for remote learners with study, career and other commitments.

Pandemic Education: Dissensus, Achievement, Enclosure

Alongside a crisis of public health, COVID-19 has also engendered a crisis of social reproduction in the domain of public education. Drawing on conversations and collaborations with K-12 education advocates in the Phoenix metropolitan area, this essay deploys an activist methodology to identify political struggles and turn the ethnographic lens onto the publics and political economies that shape them. After situating contemporary Phoenix schooling in the regional history of the southwest-turned-sunbelt, I examine emerging features of pandemic education in 2020: managed dissensus, caretaking achievement, and education technology enclosures. I retool the concept of “managed dissensus” to argue that, in polarizing debates about the pandemic, conservative politics shifted from consent to coercion in order to maintain priorities of privatizing education and “reopening” the economy. Further, as districts pursued virtual schooling, I show how an institutional project of caretaking achievement produced new patterns of alienation, disengagement, and punishment among teachers and students. Third, I consider how technology created unequal enclosures of parents and students in new gendered, racialized, and ableist regimes of education. As the pandemic continues into 2021, anthropologists should continue to examine public education and social reproduction as sites where state power, racism, and colonialism are expressed and transformed.

Education Inequality Revisited Through the Lived Experiences of Parents During Virtual Learning

The purpose of this study was to investigate the lived experiences of parents who providing support for their children during virtual learning to better understand whether virtual learning was potentially exacerbating or soothing access of children of various socio-economic statuses to education. For this purpose, an online survey was passed into all e-channels of parents of children enrolled in primary schools accessible by the researchers. A total of 87 respondents constituted the research sample. Quantitative data was analyzed using SPSS 21.0 for windows, while qualitative data was analyzed using thematic analysis. Post to this, 3 e-focus group interviews were held with a total of 18 parents who volunteered to participate to better understand their view points. Findings show that parents are highly frustrated in relation to virtual schooling offered to their children. The underlying reasons for such exasperation have been attributed to the time that it requires them to put into their children learning; the money they needed to spend on technology; the lack of proficiency they suffered from using digital technologies; the preparedness of their children’s teachers in terms of using technologies; the competency of their children using digital technologies; and the internet connectivity in the country. It can be therefore concluded that student access to education in light of Covid-19 is getting more linked to higher levels of socio-economic statuses thus advancing education inequality even more.

Education in Virtual Environments

The bricks-and-mortar schools contemplated by American education law and regulation are discrete, bureaucratic institutions, where children interact in person with one another, and with adults who supervise them, inside fixed physical borders at fixed times. Their governance is likewise defined geographically. Virtual schooling, by contrast, is untethered from geography, is ubiquitously asynchronous, and involves the interaction of machine representations of people rather than of people themselves. Virtuality privileges the consumer over the bureaucrat, encourages the disaggregation and recombination of educational components on a bespoke basis, and brings different economies of scale and competitive features to the educational marketplace. The education law we have—the law of the traditional, embodied school—fits virtual technology poorly in critical respects. Virtuality demands fundamentally new legal approaches to areas as diverse as curriculum, attendance, student health and safety, privacy, parental responsibility, disability, student rights, discipline, governance, and equity. Responding to these demands provides occasion to see the law afresh, to reassess and redirect, to align principle and practice more closely, and ultimately to transform educational regulation in the service of equity and learning. This is an opportunity of a kind that has not presented itself since the beginning of the Progressive Era.