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1 Reimagining School as a Community Project 15 Adaptation to Online Instruction
This is one of the most important questions someone has asked me in an interview.
A few weeks later, I accepted a new position as the academic director for a large online and blended school system. I walked in on my first day of the job with a host of butterflies in my stomach and a sincere resolve to implement new practices in online and blended learning.
A Note About Methodology
Through our research, Stephanie and I (Kathryn) collected and analyzed many teaching stories. We spoke with educators whose narratives resonated with our own and educators whose stories were very different from either of ours. We spoke with educators who shared their strategies for connecting with students in faceto-face, online, or blended classrooms. These educators are part of a community of teachers who are passionate about relationships, growth, and cultivation of student leadership. We hope that when you read these stories, you feel like a part of this community. We encourage you to brainstorm strategies right along with us as you create connected classrooms that are authentic to your personality and narrative. Thank you for joining us for this moment, for living out your own story, and for sharing your good works with the young people in our communities.
Stephanie and I are both writers and former language arts educators. We believe deeply in the power of stories. As school administrators, we are often awed by the incredible stories told within our school and professional learning community. In our work in global and blended classrooms, we recognized that we were navigating a new narrative of education told through a multiplicity of stories.
We believed these stories were important to share, and we wanted to include them in a book that captures this heartfelt work and invites more conversation about the life-giving role of connection in the classroom. As we set out to accomplish this goal, we committed to intentional active listening, dialogue, and story sharing. Our backgrounds and values pointed us to narrative methods for data collection. We wanted to hear from educators in their own words about their experiences making connections and creating engagement in online, blended, and global classrooms.
Grounded theory is a research methodology that aims to develop hypotheses and theories through the collection and analysis of qualitative data, including stories and interviews. In our work, we used some concepts from grounded theory to guide our coding and analysis process (Charmaz, 2014). Through coding and dialogue about coding, we sought to create an “interactive analytic space” where we could better understand the processes, conditions, and strategies that make connection possible across many classroom spaces (Charmaz, 2014, p. 109). The
written stories we solicited and received from educators across North and South America gave structure to our research on connected classrooms, a concept that continued to emerge as we coded and analyzed these stories.
In our research and planning for this book on connected classrooms, we interviewed nearly thirty educators who are actively teaching in face-to-face, blended, and online classrooms. We spoke with international teachers, instructional designers, counselors, and career educators. These professionals offered diverse experiences and perspectives. In addition to sharing stories through dialogues and unstructured interviews, each participant also wrote a personal narrative on their experiences in the classroom. The participants didn’t hold back. In fact, it felt as though many had been waiting for an invitation to write these stories down. They sent in pages and pages of text, contributing to a large data set on the conditions and possibilities for people-centered practices in online, blended, and technology-mediated classrooms. Their narratives were story-rich and full of important takeaways for this new paradigm of teaching and learning. We have selected and excerpted several of these practitioner texts to illustrate each chapter of this book.
During our research, we spoke with educators who invited students’ grandparents to join them in an online class, educators who orchestrated online research followed by community-based service projects, and educators who arranged for international guests to video in for in-person classroom meetings. These are just a few examples of the possibilities that open up when teachers can reimagine the classroom as a global community project, not a fixed room in a building. The practitioners interviewed for this project teach in a variety of school settings and live across North and South America. They are also part of our professional network, and most share a connection (as former or current colleagues, friends, and partners) to Mizzou Academy, the blended K–12 school system where we serve as administrators. Housed in the University of Missouri’s College of Education and Human Development, Mizzou Academy serves a culturally, linguistically, and geographically diverse population of close to eight thousand students annually. While this is certainly not the only context we cite in this book, it does serve as a tethering space where many of the participants honed their own people-centered practices in blended education. As you read through the chapters, we hope you’ll see these educator stories as points of connection to your own practice.
Please note in this book, we vigilantly protect personally identifiable student data. All stories and narratives that mention students by name use pseudonyms, create composite characters, and substitute analogous identifiers to further blur the identities of these students.
INTRODUCTION People-Centered Approaches to Teaching
As a global community, we have a long way to go in ensuring that all children have access to learning. A 2019 UNICEF report states over 617 million children and adolescents around the world are unable to reach minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. Further, one in five children is not in school at all (UNICEF, 2019). Many factors impact a child’s ability to access a quality education, including poverty, geography, gender, disability, and health. In our own work in global education, we (Kathryn and Stephanie) have seen each of these factors disrupt and limit children’s access to learning. We have also had the privilege and responsibility of venturing new solutions to help mitigate these challenges. These stories form the basis of this book.
UNICEF (2019) names access to learning as the greatest global challenge. This challenge does not refer to access to school buildings. With the right resources, strategies, and supports, children can access learning from many different spaces, including homes, community centers, and hospital rooms. With access to the right resources, educators can reimagine the traditional classroom setting. In fact, many educators are already building expertise in this area. For decades, educators have been testing flipped instructional methods, setting up journals and projects on Google Drive, using game-based learning platforms like Kahoot!
Essential Question
How can people-centered practices help educators teach beyond classroom walls?