Abstract
The purpose of this chapter is to consider how and what children learned during the time spent at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants in this chapter live in a mid-sized town in the southeastern United States and come from mostly low-income backgrounds. The information in this chapter comes from one-on-one interviews with parents and grandparents of school-aged children who experienced some amount of time where school was exclusively virtual. Results show that children learned diverse and unique things during this time at home. Implications include ways for teachers and parents to build off of this unique time to further strengthen the learning that now occurs back in the more traditional classroom setting.
TopIntroduction
“One of the things he said was that ‘I now understand that expression ‘be careful what you wish for’ because when you are going to school every day, you wish you were homeschooled, and he didn’t realize how much he would miss hanging out with the other kids.”
-Parent of a 6th grader regarding school closures
When the COVID-19 pandemic school closures occurred, many children across the world were exclusively learning in their home environment (Thorn & Vincent-Lancrin, 2021) on virtual platforms or with assigned packets of work, some for months or even up to an entire school year. After the physical re-opening of schools, many parents, teachers, administrators, and even mass media spoke of a “learning loss” or a “gap” in the students’ learning trajectories (Keung Hui, 2022) as a result of that “missed” time in school. This deficit-based concept of “learning loss” or a “gap” is rooted in assumptions that valid learning only occurs in the walls of a school with a professional teacher at the helm. Through a series of family interviews, this chapter documents the literacy practices and learning events that occurred in the homes of children from a predominantly Black, Title I school during the height of the pandemic, directly confronting the “learning loss” narrative. I interviewed parents and grandparents to identify the unique and diverse learning that did occur in the time spent at home. This chapter considers what looking at literacy and learning through a wider, more wholistic lens can offer regarding what children learned in their time “stuck at home.” Many of these practices were non-traditional school practices and yet indicated that important learning was occurring in various ways, such as through learning new hobbies and skills as well as having unique experiences with their families.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Learning Loss/Gap: A perspective that educators adopt that indicates students are behind or need to close a gap. These measurements are often based in standardized testing protocols and expectations that have proven to be racist and classist.
Literacy Behaviors: Ways of using and practicing literacy in everyday life, such as oral arguments, taking a stand, using literacy to further one’s position in life or better their community.
Family Literacy: Literacy that occurs in the home and community, inclusive of non-school based literacy practices such as spoken and oral literacies, religious literacies, and community practices using language, communication, reading, writing, understanding, and expression.
School Literacy: Skill-based view of literacy such as alphabetic knowledge, ability to answer passage-based questions, etc. This is often measured by time or rate.
Asset-Based Perspectives: A perspective that educators adopt to see families and children as whole, with their community and cultural knowledges as additive to the classroom and learning environment.
Funds of Knowledge: A theory that students and families come to school with vast amounts of knowledges from their homes, work lives, and histories.
Deficit-Based Perspectives: A perspective that educators adopt to see families and children as lacking, with the family and community getting in the way of education.