Written by: Karla V. Kingsley. Department of Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy, University of New Mexico
Author Note - I have no known conflict of interest to disclose. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Karla V. Kingsley, Department of Teacher Education, Educational Leadership & Policy, 1 University Avenue, Albuquerque, NM 87131. Email: karlak@unm.edu
Introduction
When our state began to shelter in place to slow the spread of COVID-19 in Spring 2020, all classes at the university where I teach were immediately moved online. The pivot from a hybrid learning environment to a fully online one brings to the fore questions of fairness and equity for marginalized individuals and groups of students at our minority-majority university. Because effective distance education requires adjustments to instruction at all levels, the shift to remote teaching raises questions about effective preparation of in-service and preservice teachers who work with students from diverse cultural, linguistic, and ability backgrounds. In this paper I address some of the difficulties faced by students, teachers, and families in New Mexico during the sudden transition to remote education. Next, I highlight important differences between the terms online learning and emergency remote teaching (Hodges et al., 2020), and how the distinction between them has bearing on the design and delivery of classes that have abruptly shifted to virtual spaces.
Using the framework of technological pedagogical content knowledge [TPCK] (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) I outline educator perspectives related to the graduate and undergraduate technology integration courses I teach at a research-intensive minority-serving public university in the southwestern United States. I emphasize the need to support students from diverse linguistic, sociocultural, and ability backgrounds, particularly those living in geographically isolated communities.
Background and Context
The abrupt unexpected closure of all schools jolted educator licensure programs in New Mexico into a state of uncertainty. I am a teacher educator, activist, and member of a remote learning team that was quickly assembled to devise ways to support the mentor teachers and preservice teachers with whom we work in the College of Education and Human Sciences. Teacher licensure programs in New Mexico require elementary and secondary teacher candidates to complete a minimum number of hours in classrooms as part of their clinical practice. However, our teacher candidates no longer had access to the students they normally interacted with during their student teaching. Our remote learning team began working closely with teacher preparation faculty and mentor teachers in the district to devise online modules for preservice teachers to complete in lieu of face-to-face student teaching. The team is coordinating with the New Mexico public education department, and aligning our work with policy directives articulated by the Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Preparation (CAEP).
This spring I asked my students how they were coping with the shift to online instruction. A Native American student responded,
“we got bigger problems than trying to get online. Our elders are dying, our people are dying.”
To put this remark in perspective, New Mexico is home to 23 Native American tribes, including 19 pueblos, three Apache tribes, and the Navajo nation. About 11% of the state’s population are Native Americans, yet the Navajo nation has one of the highest infection rates per capita in the United States (Sidner, 2020). About 60% of people who have tested positive for the COVID-19 cases in New Mexico are in tribal communities; 50% of the deaths in the state from coronavirus are Native American people (Childress, 2020). The impact of the pandemic is aggravated by the fact that between 30 and 40 percent of households on the Navajo Nation do not have running water. In tribal communities it’s not uncommon for multigenerational families to live together, with a mixture of parents, children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins all residing in the same household. These circumstances make it difficult, if not impossible for some communities to follow recommended protocols for stemming the spread of COVID-19, such as frequent handwashing, social distancing, quarantining, and self-isolation. Although Native American, Latinx, and African-American residents in the state are contracting, transmitting, and dying from the novel coronavirus at higher rates than their white counterparts, the courage and resilience of New Mexicans in the face of colossal challenges cannot be overstated.
On a macro level, a confluence of sociohistorical, political, and economic factors shape the educational landscape in New Mexico. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s 2020 Kids Count Data Report, New Mexico is ranked 50th in both education and in child well-being. Over half of young children in the state are not in school; 76% of fourth graders are not proficient in reading, and 79% of eighth graders are not proficient in mathematics (Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2020). Twenty-five percent of children in the state live in poverty, with the highest rates of poverty concentrated in Native American, Latinx, and African American communities. Geography is also a consideration. Many residents live in rural areas with limited access to health care, transportation, and internet service. In remote areas where internet connectivity is available, it is slow and unreliable. A lack of access to healthy food, mental and behavioural support services, and living-wage employment also contribute to low levels of academic achievement in the state. Almost half of my students, and several of the teachers I work with reported that their families rely on a single device (Moore, 2018), usually a cell phone, for internet access at home. Each of these factors, individually and cumulatively, can impact the quality of instruction.
Structural Inequalities and the Digital Divide
Students, teachers, and university faculty in the state were unprepared for the emergency shift to online instruction. For two weeks after schools closed and the state went into lockdown, K-12 teachers had little guidance on how to proceed with instruction for the remainder of the school year. Teachers were told not to come up with new assignments or teach new content, and not to use online learning platforms that hadn’t been approved by the PED. Rather, teachers were directed to create review packets for students to complete at home. Most teachers did not have the resources to create the homework packets, as their instructional materials were at school. After working through these difficulties, the teachers coordinated with parents and families to arrange for pick up and drop off of homework packets. But for children who were too young to read or who were not fluent in English, deciphering the instructions for homework fell to parents, who oftentimes also had limited proficiency in English. Directions were usually written in English or Spanish, and for tribal schools, the Navajo language (Diné Bizaad). Despite having a considerable number of immigrant learners and students who learning English from all over the world, New Mexico has few resources for translating academic materials into languages other than Spanish and Diné.
Eventually, school districts cobbled together a collection of laptops and tablet computers that enabled students to meet with their teachers virtually. School buses were sent into rural areas, where they parked for a few hours with a router on the dashboard to provide a hotspot for kids to log in. Families walked, biked, or drove to hotspot locations so their children could video conference with their teachers, download homework, and/or watch educational videos (D’Ammassa, 2020). Although these short-term solutions worked to some extent, they presented challenges for parents who lacked transportation, and for families with children in different grades whose teachers expected them to be online at different times of the day. The mentor teachers I work with reported that many children (and parents) who were provided with laptops had no idea how to set up a user account to access the district’s online portal, or how to log into educational programs, connect a camera and speakers, or interact with video conferencing software.
For the most part my university students were disappointed in the sudden changeover to online teaching. They missed their friends and classmates and the face to face interaction with me. Some were lonely, having had little human interaction since the lockdown began. Some were essential workers who found themselves working full time while also taking five or six online classes; a handful were working overtime because a colleague was sick or caring for a family member who was ill or quarantined. Others lost their jobs or had their working hours reduced and were trying to figure out a financial plan for how to remain in school. Some lost family members. Several students found themselves caring for their younger siblings, including babies and toddlers, which made participation in remote learning difficult. Others were parents themselves, trying to shepherd their school-aged children through an unfamiliar online milieu, sometimes while having been displaced from family housing on campus. An inability to concentrate on schoolwork due to stress, anxiety, and depression was reported by almost all preservice teachers in my classes. For some students, it was impossible to finish the semester, and they dropped the class.
According to student feedback, the problem wasn’t so much that instruction was virtual as the fact that the shift had happened without warning, leaving them without a plan for dealing with logistical problems such as making arrangements for transportation and childcare, or finding a place to live after the dorms closed. On the other hand, at the end of the semester most students shared that they had acquired new skills related to remote teaching that will be helpful for them in the future when they become teachers.
On the university side, faculty with little or no experience with remote teaching found themselves navigating online instruction essentially on their own. The university’s computer support staff assisted as they could, but with faculty across the entire university needing support with the transition to distance education, wait time for a response from information technology support staff was a couple of days. Students who were taking my class and enrolled in other courses expressed frustration that they had been thrust into poorly designed, hastily constructed virtual courses where neither they nor their instructors had the knowledge or experience with technology needed to successfully engage in remote instruction. The most common complaint was that instructors were assigning them busywork, giving them things to do and tasks to complete that weren’t helping them learn or preparing them for their student teaching. I found myself doing the reverse: paring down assignments, extending deadlines for homework, eliminating readings and leaving out online discussions. Neither piling on coursework nor purging content, however, is an ideal solution, and it is here that the distinction between online learning and emergency remote teaching (EMR) becomes salient.
Emergency Remote Teaching
Hodges and colleagues (2020) point out that an abrupt, unplanned shift to virtual teaching, like what is happening now in schools and universities, is qualitatively different from what the professional literature defines as online learning. Hodges and his co-authors have proposed
“a specific term for the type of instruction being delivered in these pressing circumstances: emergency remote teaching” (para. 6).
Emergency remote teaching (ERT) is what is put into place when a hurricane, tornado, wildfire, or other large-scale disaster occurs. Online learning, in contrast, involves a careful design process that includes long term planning and preparation and the utilization of a systematic model for instructional delivery (Means, et al., 2014). Differentiating ERT from online learning means recognizing that
“nobody making the transition to online teaching under these circumstances will truly be designing to take full advantage of the affordances and possibilities of the online format” (Hodges et al., para. 5).
Ideally, education in the future will land somewhere between ERT and fully developed online instruction, where the priority is on equity for all learners. Education, whether done face-to-face, in hybrid format, or virtually, needs to focus on culturally responsive/sustaining pedagogies (Gay, 2000; Paris & Alim, 2017) and instructional approaches that value and accommodate learners with diverse cultural, linguistic, and ability backgrounds and needs at all levels (Pauly, Kingsley, & Baker, 2019).
Public education writ large is in need of sweeping transformation regardless of how long the pandemic lasts. Karalis and Raikou (2020) have noted that changes to education are needed in both traditional and in distance formats, but they admonish against viewing the abrupt shift to remote instruction as bipolar: either as a panacea or as Armageddon. A post-pandemic world (Kim, 2020; McCarty, 2020) will likely include a combination of distance education and face-to-face instruction where students have opportunities to learn collaboratively through classroom interaction and experiential practice, but also through remote instruction where the role of technology is to enhance, enrich, and extend learning and participation (Karalis & Raikou). In my view, this means incorporating the needs of families and communities into a reconceptualized model of education that addresses problems of systemic racism and structural inequality. Doing so will require educators and teacher educators to validate and build on students’ strengths and assets by incorporating the cultures, languages, experiences, and identities of students – their funds of knowledge -- into the curriculum (Gonzáles, Moll, & Amanti, 2009). Despite calls to review previously taught material rather than teach new concepts during the pandemic, I believe teachers must resist what amounts to
“low-income and minority students receiv[ing] a steady diet of low-level material coupled with unstimulating, rote-oriented teaching“ (Darling-Hammond, 2006, p. 223).
In addition, teachers and staff need to enact trauma-sensitive responses to support students who may be experiencing multiple traumas related to their life circumstances. Teachers, too, need assistance in coping with trauma, and with developing self-care skills to contend with pain and distress in healthy ways.
Teaching for Equity and Social Justice
Educational institutions in our state will begin the autumn school year virtually, with the possibility of shifting to hybrid classes if the pandemic subsides and it becomes safe to return to school. Students who have been underserved in traditional educational environments will now face further marginalization due to the shift to remote teaching. Students with individualized education plans (IEPs), English learners, students living in poverty, and children and teens without stable housing will be further sidelined by a lack of access to their teachers and to appropriate educational resources. Students most in need of support will likely receive little help. It can be argued that societal and educational disparities are largely rooted in what DiAngelo calls a default system of colonization and discrimination, wherein
“our institutions were designed to reproduce racial inequality and they do so with efficiency. Our schools are particularly effective at this task” (2018, p. 153).
DiAngelo’s assertion appears to be supported by data from the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE), which reported that only 11 states currently require school districts to enact specific strategies to support students in distance education environments, and only 11 provide support to learners with disabilities. Only seven states require districts to provide support for English learners in remote settings. Four percent of rural school districts and 21 percent of suburban districts have announced fully remote education plans, compared to 55 percent of urban districts (Jochim, Hassel, & Clifford, 2020). Students whose identities are shaped by complex intersections of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, dis/ability, language, citizenship status, sexual orientation, religion, and diverse life worlds will likely be disproportionately disadvantaged during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Currently, our state is under court order to remediate a public education system that has failed to provide a minimally adequate education for “at-risk” students, including children with disabilities, English learners, and students from Spanish-speaking and Native American communities (Martinez et al. consolidated with Yazzie et al. v. The State of New Mexico, 2018). The novel coronavirus has brought education to an inflection point. A pedagogy of social justice (Sleeter, 2015) and critical consciousness (Friere,1970) is urgently needed, one that not only eliminates geographic barriers to learning, but also works to heal the social, psychological, emotional, spiritual, physical, and academic trauma, the soul wounds (Duran & Duran, 1995) inflicted on minoritized students. In electronic learning environments, this means fashioning a culturally responsive, student-centered curriculum that integrates the knowledge, languages, and lived experiences of historically marginalized students. It also includes recognizing that students, families, and teachers are likely experiencing emotions related to grief and trauma due to loss of a loved one or as a result of changes in daily life that can cause feelings of shock, shame, sadness, guilt, denial, and depression. Unfortunately, teachers often do not receive training in how to process loss and grief (Dunn & Garcia, 2020). Yet social and emotional well-being, including self-care, are topics that can and should be taught.
Digital storytelling (DST) is a strength-based approach I have been using to weave together social and emotional learning with issues of equity during the pandemic. Like social justice, DST is not so much a subject area to be studied as an interdisciplinary approach that can enhance instruction and assessment at all levels. It meshes well with evidence-based frameworks such as project-based learning, the next generation science standards (NGSS), and 21st century learning skills as a way to meaningfully incorporate technology across the content areas: reading and writing, mathematics and science, social studies and the arts, physical and mental health. Digital storytelling is also useful for creating empathetic, inclusive learning environments for students with diverse needs, interests, and abilities.
I focus on integrating not only cognitive and social applications into my technology classes, but also on emotional well-being, particularly through storytelling and inquiry research. This semester, students wrote blogs or reflective journals to document how they were feeling, recording their fears and anxieties, as well as what inspired them and motivated them to keep learning. Next, they tapped social media and mobile applications to practice repurposing these technologies for academic use by utilizing the technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge (TPCK) framework (Mishra & Koehler, 2006). Facebook, Instagram, You Tube, TikTok, and Snapchat offered spaces for students to explore, analyze and argue current issues that mattered to them such as Black Lives Matter, removal of confederate statues, child separation and immigrant rights, fake news and misinformation, and coronavirus. Students shared their postings in small groups, where their peers and I responded, allowing everyone to engage with complex topics and gain experience modeling respectful civil discourse when sharing alternative perspectives. Currently, it is unclear how helpful these activities were for the preservice teachers. The professional literature on effective remote teaching during the pandemic is inchoate. Moving forward, research is needed on how teachers and teacher educators might improve pedagogy and professional development during the shift from ERT to robust online learning.
References
Annie E. Casey Foundation. (2020). Kids Count Data Book. Baltimore, MD: Author. Available at www.aecf.org [Accessed 1 June 2020]
Childress, M. (2020, May). Native Americans make up 50% of COVID-19 deaths in New Mexico. Available at http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/051220_nm_cv_native_am/native-americans-make-up-50-covid-19-deaths-new-mexico/ [Accessed 12 June 2020]
D’Ammassa, A. (2020, May 28). As classrooms become more virtual amid COVID-19, broadband gaps loom large in NM. Available at https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/education/2020/05/28/new-mexico-coronavirus-schools-virtual-classrooms-broadband-gaps/3114780001/ [Accessed 6 June 2020]
Darling-Hammond, L. (2006). Powerful teacher education: Lessons from exemplary programs. John Wiley & Sons.
DiAngelo, R. (2018). White fragility: Why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. Beacon Press.
Donald, B. (2020). Inequality in schools threatens U.S. prosperity, Stanford scholars say. Available at https://news.stanford.edu/pr/2013/pr-education-equity-report-022013.html [Accessed 9 June 2020]
Dunn. M. & Garcia, A. (2020). Grief, loss, and literature: Reading texts as social artifacts. English Journal, 190(6), 52-58.
Duran, E., & Duran, B. (1995). Native American postcolonial psychology. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
Friere, P. (1970/2002). Pedagogy of the oppressed. (M. Bergman Ramos, Trans.). New York: Contiuum.
Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.
González, N., Moll, L. C., & Amanti, C. (2009). Funds of knowledge theorizing practices in households, communities, and classrooms. New York, NY: Routledge.
Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockeee, B., Trust, T., & Bond, A. (2020). The difference between emergency remote teaching and online teaching. EDUCAUSE Review. Available at https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote- teaching-and-online- learning?fbclid=IwAR0yiCtV1QE9bUgSjiBxK4JDhS0_ORoBpSs0o6gkju2zimYHc6jWSNfnE1M [Accessed 10 June 2020]
Jochim, A., Hassel, B., & Clifford, B. (2020). States must take decisive action to avert the coming education crisis. Available at www.crpe.org [Accessed 10 June 2020]
Karalis, T., & Raikou, N. (2020). Teaching at the time of COVID-19: Inferences and implications for higher education pedagogy. International Journal of Academic Research in Business and Social Sciences, 10(5), 479-493.
Kids Count. (2020). School enrollment by district in New Mexico. Available at https://datacenter.kidscount.org/data/tables/2168-school-enrollment-by-district#detailed/2/any/false/1648,1603,1539,1381,1246,1124,1021,909/any/4540 [Accessed 12 June 2020]
Kim, J. (2020, April 1). Teaching and learning after COVID-19. Inside Higher Ed. Available at https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/learning-innovation/teaching-and-learning-after-covid-19 [Accessed 4 June 2020]
Martinez et al. consolidated with Yazzie et al. v The State of New Mexico. (2018). 1st Dist. Court of New Mexico, D-101-CV-2014-00793 Decision and Order.
McCarty, S. (2020). Post-pandemic pedagogy. Journal of Online Education. Special Issue on Teaching Online during the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic. Available at http://www.nyu.edu/classes/keefer/waoe/mccartyspan.pdf [Accessed 10 June 2020]
Means, B, Bakia, M., & Murphy, R. (2014). Learning online: what the research tells us about whether, when, and how. New York, NY: Routledge.
Mishra, P., & Koehler, M.J. (2006). Technological pedagogical content knowledge: A framework for integrating technology in teacher knowledge. Teachers College Record, 108(6), 1017-1054.
Moore, R., Vitale, D., & Stawinoga, N. (2018). The digital divide and educational equity: A look at students with very limited access to electronic devices at home. Available at www.act.org [Accessed 17 June 2020]
Paris, D., & Alim, S. (Eds.). (2017). Culturally sustaining pedagogies: Teaching and learning for justice in a changing world. New York: Teachers College Press.
Pauly, N., Kingsley, K. V., & Baker, A. (2019). Culturally sustaining pedagogy through arts-based learning: Preservice teachers engage emergent bilinguals. LEARNing Landscapes, 12(3), 52-56. https://doi.org/10.36510/learnland.v12i1.988 [Accessed 17 June 2020]
Sidner, S. (2020, May). Navajo Nation has the highest infection rate per capita in the United States. Available at https://www.krqe.com/health/coronavirus-new-mexico/navajo-nation-has-highest-infection-rate-per-capita-in-u-s/ [Accessed 17 June 2020]
Sleeter, C. (2015). Deepening social justice teaching. Journal of Language and Literacy Education. [Online.]. Available at http://jolle.coe.uga.edu/ [Accessed 18 June 2020]