Abstract
This discussion shares one working parent's experiences, as a parent aiding her daughter in an eLearning environment. In March 2019, the daughter's elementary school shut down due to COVID-19. Soon after, the schools began using Zoom and Schoology to help maintain a semblance of normalcy and a semblance of attempts towards continuing the learning process within a challenging cultural and sociological situation. What is shared is the parent's journey through which the parent struggled to sustain levels of normalcy in the home and the community. The focus of the discussion revolved around the school week, the school day, and school-based relationships, while also emphasizing the parent's voice through her perspective.
TopIntroduction
As COVID-19 flooded through our large metropolitan area of the Gulf Coast Region of Texas, every citizen’s world experienced core changes. The work environment changed as employees begin to adjust and work from home remotely. School-aged children were sent home while the classroom teachers desperately tried to figure out how to instruct within a remote environment without training or much support. Service industries were shut down, with businesses closing and hourly workers finding themselves without jobs and associated income. The world that everyone knew had stopped without any warning, and people tried to find a new normal as the weeks turned into months, into over a year on some level of lockdown, hand sanitizer, and mandatory masks. Our parent, a middle-class professional woman who embraces her role as Mother to her elementary-age daughter, continuously reflects upon and offers the perspective. Our parent attempts to successfully support her daughter’s learning within an unconscionable situation that was unexpected and an environment in which the schools were not ready for a shift into the world of remote teaching and learning. The parent’s perspective is vitally essential. Her perspective brings forward a parent's voice during a difficult time while maintaining employment in a remote work environment while also acting as a responsible parent. Also, the parent recognized the importance and impact of a solid educational experience upon her daughter’s current grade-appropriate learning and future life endeavors.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Virtual: This type of environmental space reflects distance between people in space and place yet remaining synchronously communicative in nature, sometimes with the additional perspective of differences in time engagement through asynchronous communication engagement.
Pandemic: This is an outbreak of a disease, a sickness, that covers a wide expanse of landscape, that may be within a specific area such as a city, or a larger space such as a state, a nation, or on a global level of outbreak.
Parent's Voice: This is the viewpoint of the parent or guardian of an underage child. Within the current associated discussion, the parent's voice offers perspectives of the elementary child's experiences as the regular school day was shut down, shifted into remote learning as the immediacy of response was reflective of the societal lockdown while still attempting to maintain the child's age-appropriate progression through the school-based course curriculum based upon age and ability of the student learner. The parent's voice is imperative, towards reflecting upon the micro viewpoint understanding around what was occurring in the home as remote learning became a reality, as well as a macro viewpoint understanding due to the wider scope of landscape impacts upon not only the student, but also the classroom teacher, the school, and the community within which the student is embedded.
COVID-19: This is a Pandemic that was realized early in 2020 and became realized as a global impact. In late 2020 into early 2021, there was realized different strains of COVID that swiftly moved into different continents.
School Personnel: The staff side of the school, this includes secretarial support, paraprofessional support, professional staff, and administrative support. Classroom teachers are a part of the school personnel, although the rest of the school personnel are tasked with ensuring the classroom teacher has the ability to do her or his job.
School Week: The discussion revolves around a traditional five days a week time frame, within which the students are traditionally housed within a school environment while the parents are at work or at home. The shift to remote learning embedded the family's normal school week behaviors within one space, wherein the working parents continued working and the student continued learning from the teacher, yet within one all-encompassing space.
Classroom Teacher: This is the label for the course instructor, who regularly designs the subject matter curriculum, instructs the courses, and guides the students through individual and group learning experiences, as well as formatively and summatively evaluates the student's progression towards attainment of learning objectives. The classroom teacher's shift into a remote learning environment was difficult, due to the lack of training, support and experience for working within remote and online learning environments.
School Day: The traditional school day of an elementary school within the United States of America begins with the early drop off of students, by parents who must work; teachers attend and are oversight caretakers for the students who show up an hour or two early for their school day, due to the parent's workplace timeline expectations. The elementary school day begins at approximately 8:00 a.m., wherein students have a home classroom, their primary classroom, in which they spend most of the day, but also move between different classrooms for physical education, artistic classes, music classes, time in the library, as well as movement between classes for another traditional subject such as mathematics or science courses. The students always return to their home classroom for restroom breaks and lunchtime. Many schools traditionally have after-school programs, wherein the children have caretakers until the parents can pick up the students after the workday. During the shift to remote teaching and learning, the school day was disrupted; the student's normal daily schedule was disrupted, also causing difficulty in the student's regular day's events.
Learning Environment: This may be defined as face-to-face or online environments in which instruction occurs, including hybrid and flipped instructional engagement opportunities. The shift from face-to-face learning environments into a remote learning environment is differentiated from what is understood as eLearning environments, due to the “knee-jerk” nature of the shift that takes place in a sense of emergency and without the support, training or time allocation to design and develop a strategic plan towards successful implementation.