By Heather Barker Vermeer Industry Reporter
Previously viewed as a quirky lifestyle choice for liberal-leaning alternatives, COVID thrust home schooling into the mainstream conversation. By March 2020, teachers worldwide had begun the ‘unprecedented’ job of delivering education to 1.4 billion students remotely. The term ‘home schooling’ re-entered public discourse, to the frustration of teachers who rightly felt it painted the wrong picture; teachers, not parents, were still doing the teaching with students ‘at home learning’. The pandemic and its impact on the education sector threw lives into turmoil, illustrated social economic disparities, led to dropout and depression
and tragedy. The negative impacts of lockdown and subsequent ‘at home learning’ are already being explored and documented in global research, but what about the bright sides to the sudden necessity? New research looks at how schools might use the challenges of COVID-era learning to improve education models. ‘The Covid-19 learning crisis as a challenge and an opportunity for schools: An evidence review and conceptual synthesis of research-based tools for sustainable change’, is a report, published by Cambridge University, which seeks to expand our understanding of “how schools can become change agents capable of transforming local practice to address the challenges arising from the Covid-19 pandemic”. Authors, Hofmann et al, write: “The widespread educational disruption has led to growing acknowledgement that returning
Parents would email at all times of day and night… some of the outright demands they would make were bordering on offensive to what was before is neither viable nor desirable for many schools post-pandemic.” This is, to my knowledge, the first study that “depicts how the blurring of school boundaries has impacted teachers’ work”, and it suggests that some of the offshoots from the pandemic may help enable change for better in our classrooms and schools, in that is has “revealed latent educational resources”. It makes for a thought-provoking read
that draws on “cultural-historical activity theory and Vygotsky’s notion of double stimulation as a conceptual mechanism of transformative agency”, if you find yourself wanting to go there... Quality and quantity of parental engagement is a constant in assisting students’ success across the board. Research has found a strong correlation between parental involvement and overall academic achievement,
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SPECIAL REPORT
‘At home learning’ points to pandemic positives
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EDUCATION
Term 1, 2022 | schoolnews.co.nz
