Schooling Interrupted: Educating Children and Youth in the Covid-19 Era
Abstract
Distance education has been practised for generations, although its pur-pose and form have changed. Correspondence courses, in which students receive instruction via mail and respond with assignments or questions to the instructor, date back to the mid-1800s, if not earlier. As technology changed, so did the nature of distance education. Radio, television, com-puters, and, most recently, the internet have supported distance education over the years. Research studies on the use and effectiveness of distance education focus almost exclusively on higher education. A recent research synthesis sug-gests that fewer than five per cent of the studies have addressed K-12 edu-cation. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, has brought distance education into K-12 schools and classrooms. Distance education in the Covid-19 era has been referred to as ‘emergency remote teaching’ (ERT) because, with little research on which to rely, teachers must improvise quick solutions under less-than-ideal circumstances, a situation that causes many teachers to experience stress.The purpose of this paper is to address five fundamental questions. First, what problems have K-12 school administrators and teachers faced in im-plementing ERT? Second, under what conditions has ERT been effective since the advent of the Covid-19 pandemic? Third, what are the strengths of ERT in K-12 schools and classrooms? Fourth, what are the weakness-es of ERT in K-12 schools and classrooms? Fifth, to what extent will les-sons learned from ERT influence teaching and learning when the pan-demic abates? The paper concludes with a brief set of recommendations. Throughout the paper, the focus is on K-12 education.
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References
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