Written by: Giota Alevizou, The Open University
As I write these lines, the UK is officially rolling out of ‘lockdown’. Although schools remain physically ‘closed’ to the majority of their students, or maintain a social distancing rule for those who are able to attend, the boom we are seeing to technologies and techniques that connect us, shows that neither the social nor learning are among the things that we can afford to give up.
Since March 2020, universities, colleges and schools have striven to pivot to virtual learning environments on very short notice, the world’s premier educational, cultural and media institutions have ‘opened up’ their virtual doors to a multitude of educational resources and courses alike. Celebrity mathematicians and authors offered their share to inspire the nation’s children, and fitness instructors turned their physical education sessions to instant, global YouYube phenomena. Meanwhile, national (as well as free, and widely accessed and accessible) efforts ranging BBC’s Bitesize with daily videos and resources online and on iPlayer, and Oak National Academy, an online enterprise set up by teachers and funded by the Department for Education, provide hundreds of lessons each week, from Reception to GCSE level, in a range of subjects.
Like many exceptional, and widely accessed schools (see for example the Charles Dickens Primary School and School 21 in South and East London respectively, to mention but a few), such initiatives have adopted inclusive approaches to remote teaching that combine traditional paper-based mediums with asynchronous instructional videos, fusing presentations and screencasting and talking heads with humorous amalgamated showcases of students’ work - emailed or uploaded by parents or pupils - to inspire and motivate. While others have adopted more synchronous platforms (ranging from Microsoft teams to Google Classroom among others), the comeback of video (often facilitated by non-indexed YouTube or Vimeo uploads), signifies a familiar model of media-depended accessibility that traditional distance education – initiated by The Open University – promoted. These online videos can be played by smart TVs, computers and mobile phones. With teachers explaining a topic to learners and getting them to pause the video or complete tasks such as questions, fill in the blanks, or research activities, learning is aimed to be self-directed and scaffolded. Private schools have opted for virtual learning environments and schools in areas with low socio-economic status have opted for delivering physical packs to cater for pupils with no internet connection. Other schools had limited capacity to design virtual and remote schooling whatsoever. And while provisions are geographically disproportionate, income inequalities accentuate existing problems. A recent report has revealed that children from better-off families are spending 30% more time on home learning than are those from poorer families.
As a socio-economically privileged parent in the beginning of lockdown, I had initially found myself juggling through an ocean of resources and measures to cope with new routines of all-family-at-home working, virtual/home-schooling as well as immediate professional, financial and health anxieties. I experienced equal doses of gratitude and digital fatigue – a fatigue for constantly required to be online and plugged in, an overwhelming sense of overload from media, resources and messages, but also from the impeding priorities of ‘digital’ pedagogies. This imposed - yet necessary - confinement, compelled me to reflect on what converging new roles of digital parenting/schooling may mean, I - like other digital learning and online education researchers - am reminded of some surprisingly sound advice: do less, be more creative. At the same time, an urgent need for resilience has been the only resource that keeps popping up in discussions. There’s an urgent need for it to equip us all as parents, educators and employees, for facing an uncertain and – possibly – bleak future.
With teachers and schools being also at the front line of heroic service during the pandemic, I too have striven to use my research in digital media and experience in provision of online, open education at a distance to structure my reflections as a parent, teacher and researcher. Whilst the observations and concerns about the immediate experiences and misgivings of digital schooling that follow are by no means exhaustive, I too, as a researcher, educator and parent would like to propose a plan for engaging students, parents and teachers for a more empathetic approach for developing resilience in approaching the future of both schooling and learning.
Learning at a distance: novel tensions and inequalities
Historically, the association of distance education with media organizations and technologies (notably exemplified through The Open University/BBC partnership) used to address two basic aspects: firstly, pragmatic (modes of instruction and delivery, affordable and convenient access); and, secondly, social, egalitarian ethos. The latter has been associated with cultural pedagogies, alternative curricula, community education and independent learning. More recently, the merging of open education with ‘online technologies’ and social media (ranging from Massive Open Online Courses, to ‘open study communities’) and popular portals ranging from YouTube Edu and Khan Academy for school children, to mention a few, have being approached as sites of opportunity and ambiguity, pushing the boundaries of institutions, professional communities and the students that inhabit them. At the centre of this ambiguity have been both opportunities for alternative public learning and risks against datafication and marketization of higher education. While many HEIs offer a multitude of ‘open courses’, have been dealing with blended learning approaches and have sophisticated EdTech to Learning Management Systems (VLEs) to support a complete transition to online, the logistics and pedagogy of distance learning are indeed very different from that of face-to-face teaching.
The case of being digitally connected, to learn at a distance, is more far reaching for schools and further education colleges. Experts, like Prof. Rose Lucking from UCL’s IoE, for example, have warned that “very few primary schools have the sophisticated technology and support needed to adequately implement online learning platforms”, and, that online transition may result in “disadvantaged learners [becoming] even more disadvantaged”. Although efforts like that of National OAK academy and from others that are willing to publicly share their teaching, help, they are not enough. Teachers also have become overstretched with new shifts and routines, learning new tools and everyday online content creation, while they become increasingly anxious about the ways in which they can cater for wellbeing on students and younger children online, especially those with special education and health needs. They even engage more in a kind of COVID-gogy: juggling between catering for the practical needs of vulnerable families and those emotional pragmatic needs of key workers’ children at school, the partial return of some years since early June, and, finally inspiring the children at home through online.
The scale of both digital and socio-economic inequalities may become ever more challenging if we consider global figures: Indeed even before the 20-March closure of British schools, United Nations had reported that school closures in 13 countries were already disrupting the education of 290 million students globally, “a figure without precedent.”
Responding to requests for urgent measures, several AI-driven learning platforms for schools, including the British-based Century Microsoft’s FlipGrid, and US-based Edmodo have considered offering free access to their services. This comes after the exponential growth of AI in education with hundreds of start-ups, competing to offer personalized learning solutions to schools in the UK and worldwide, has led many to raise concerns, not only about the pedagogical suitability or effectiveness of such systems, but also ethical risks surrounding the possible hyper-automation of teaching and learning (for a comprehensive review, see Nesta’s ‘Educ-AI-tion Rebooted’).
So notwithstanding the tensions between the interface of learning online and the pedagogy of distant learning, our current unique circumstances lend themselves to more pressing questions to direct research and immediate, collective response:
What could the impact on students at schools with fewer resources be and, is the potential of the pandemic likely to widen the already rife digital and socio-economic divides in education
What kinds of measures and safeguards could be best used to mitigate potential negative issues related to using online media, digital platforms and educational technologies for a schooling system which may operate newly adopted blended learning models?
How can parents and teachers be better equipped to collaborate in order to better serve “learning companions” — offering feedback on tasks, suggested educational resources, and activities, but also providing caring and supporting emotional well-being?
What sort of crucial and alternative curricula or literacies need to be brought forward during this crisis and what methods and pedagogies should be developed to equip teachers and students alike with resilience capacities for the aftermath of the crisis? We first need to have a wider conversation about the values we want technology and digital media help promote.
Towards more equal, open schooling? Imagining a more resilient and collaborative future for teachers and families
The children’s commissioner and Sutton Trust charity (Culumane and Montacute/The Sutton Trust, 2020) have warned about the impact on disadvantaged children who do not necessarily have the support they need at home and who would be the ones who would lose out on the most. According to these figures, only 23% of schools in deprived areas had an online platform for pupils to use, and 1/3 of vulnerable children are taking part in online lessons. While the digital future of education during COVID-19, has prompted the education sector to accelerate the digital transformation process, what does it really mean for future pedagogical priorities?
In June, the UK Department of Education announced government to rollout of a national £350 million tutoring programme (NTP) to support primary and secondary students who have missed out on learning due to school closures. Although several tutoring models and approaches have been piloted by the NTP partners with support of private and charity funding, potential misgivings about the handling of such a programme, cause for widespread speculation, particularly because of regular mis-management of previous measures to tackle access in-equalities (i.e. the year 10 laptop/tablet scheme that never was). This combination of previous mishandlings with newer reports mentioning proposals which include secondary schools dropping other subjects for two terms next academic year so students can catch up in English and maths, does not leave much space for optimism for inclusive visions. Or indeed plans that take into account teachers’ voices and students’ rights.
Over the last few months, both education and digital technology experts have propagated the need for developing necessary and alternative, creative curricula to cater for wellbeing and mental health, during periods of transition (e.g., Dodd et al., 2020) - a period whereby clarity in approaches and communication with families would be fundamental (Livingstone, 2020). Prior to the pandemic crisis, several education researchers have used evidence from the use of creative literacies & critical literacies for reaping benefits and disrupting what is often coined as ‘pedagogy of poverty’ in low socio-economic schools (see Hempel-Jorgensen; Cremin; Harris, and Chamberlain, 2018; Selwyn, 2015). What’s more, supporting calls for more inclusive education systems as part of the pandemic recovery, the Director of Education for Nesta – also a partner in NTP – argues for the need to continue nurturing ‘interdisciplinarity in blended learning’, ‘interest-led rather than simply subject-led curricula’, evidence-informed and contextual support of educational technology and building a collaborative culture beyond the classroom.
COVID-19's impact on the nature of schooling therefore brings forward a number of longer term issues that call for research, evidence-informed practice and collective response: the first, relates to unequal digital access, technological biases resulting in attainment and wellbeing gaps. A second, and interrelated issue, relates to the kinds of measures and safeguards that should be put in place to alleviate risks and share best practice about creative and digital pedagogies.
In my formal and informal discussions with teachers and education stakeholders during May and June 2020, a number of questions were shared: What methods, pedagogies and communication infrastructures should be used or co-developed to equip teachers and families with resilience capacities and resilient literacies for the aftermath, or possibly, the elongated rollout of the COVID-19 crisis? And how can we look at inequality as core lens of analysis and understanding to design these resilience capabilities and literacies? In spite of overwork and increasing frustration, some teachers expressed the need to collectively develop a pragmatic list and evidence-informed practices of available approaches and best case scenarios, to better tackle and prevent increasingly inequalities. What sort of capacities we need to develop more creativity and resilience in shaping the future nature of schooling?
Notions of resilience and capacity building have long been promoted in crisis and reparation contexts (see Alevizou, et al., 2016; Brooks and Kendall, 2013; Chen et al. 2013), whereby exposure to, and transitioning from, risk, can also lead to developing self-confidence, or necessary skills to cope with the unexpected or knowledge of new community practices. Often dimensions of communications, cultures and networks have been at the core of resilience building in urban contexts (Aurigi, 2013) and in digital cultures, (Livingstone, 2010; Alevizou, 2017; Selwyn et al., 2016). A recent upsurge in calls for the improvement of science-based ‘collaboratives’ advocates approaches to public (Cairney, 2017) and education policy (Godfrey and Brown, 2018) take into account teachers’ and families voices and in research-informed collaborative pedagogies. Adopting these notions of resilience may a good starting point for coping with current and upcoming crises.
Inviting research and evidence informed practices to respond to current questions and crises may be not as straightforward as it sounds. Like in the past, we need research that builds on critical access to literacy and on critical understandings of digital technology in education (Selwyn et al., 2016; Dreamson, 2020) to inform the development of a blended model of schooling that integrates both formal and informal learning. Such an approach can integrate meta-cognitive and communicative perspectives to pedagogy and wellbeing with an ethics of resilience building, and to aim to: generate important benefits (e.g. supporting connections of teaching communities with disadvantaged families); compensate for gaps in public provisions (e.g. by connecting communities of teachers and among teachers and families); and also to account for risks (e.g. selective inclusion; data privacy risks; emergence of novel [digital] safeguarding and wellbeing issues). Such an approach may need to re-conceptualize resilience in context, as relations of interdependence through mutual concerns, attachments, recognition and meeting needs of one another. Such an approach may come to fruition by scaling both digital and up participatory methodologies for engagement within school-based and blended learning environments. And it can be used to produce innovative resources where the sharing pedagogical ideas used in context are further deliberated and enhanced.
By combining creative storytelling with collective intelligence and deliberation tools, both in digital communication and physical face to face contexts, such an ambitious approach may indeed generate insights and account for educators’, parents’ and young people’s agency. This will allow a viable chart to emerge for other educators and families to use as a guide in selecting what works best according to their circumstances.
Re-enforcing reading as well as critical communication and digital literacies?
As our roles converge at multiple levels and our anxiety about future scenarios and inequalities exacerbates, we may want to use this time to engage in a wider (digital) conversation about the values we want technologies to enact and the kinds of literacies our children may need to make sense of the (digital) realities that surround our world.
We may want to replace the pre-COVID-19 emphasis of the National Curriculum on computing curriculum on coding skills, not just with a catch up for maths and English, but with a call to enhancing human creativity that would inspire young people to engage in creative work - even for mainstream subjects, and for a more inclusive, decolonized curriculum.
Likewise, we may need to re-introduce critical media literacies to enable children and young people assess biases embedded in data perhaps in gaming-playing or youtube lessons, and to help them develop a better understanding of digital and (co)creative rights for navigating broader digital environments. Properly evaluating online content can also be included in inviting them to watch child-friendly news together, or asking them to assess the evidence in the information that so easily parents share on WhatsApp groups. ‘Media literacy efforts really can work in schools, communities, and families’ particularly in light of COVID-19 fake-news upward spiral, Sonia Livingstone argues, offering a multitude of suggestions to families: from figuring out child-friendly trustworthy information and news sites (like BBC’s Newsround, iReporter game Guardian’s fake or real, Bitesize Fact or Fake?) to empowering young people developing critical judgement and critical game-play.
Often, health threats and fear of illness makes us want to stop time. If this stopping of time was imposed upon, some of us may have taken advantage of it to humbly embrace our humanity and to care for ourselves, our children and others, who need our caring to spread more than ever before. While we were asked to distance ourselves from each other, we may have been sharing experiences of confusion and chaos leading us to improvise on temporary solutions. Though such moments unite us on a global scale with shared fears, restrictions and realities, we have not all gone into this moment on equal grounds. As every threat shakes the foundational structures in our society, there are those among us who have entered this moment more vulnerable and who will require varied types and different levels of resilience to cope with the future.
Many of the changes we have seen during the lockdown are likely to persist, it is necessary to re-visit these decisions and put them under scrutiny. Some hastily introduced measures and innovations will supply solutions that may lead to fairer futures and more equal outcomes. But, left to be ‘implemented’ with very little context or reasonable judgement, they may exacerbate persistent inequalities and vulnerabilities. It’s about time that we all engage in a pedagogy that makes the sharing of the responsibility about assessing the shape of how learning for children and young people is implemented far into the future.
References
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