Theme 3: Modifications to Teaching and Reliance on Technology
A graduate level course was converted to online Zoom meetings during the lockdown. After several class meetings, one student asked another gently, "Could I ask you a question? You don't have to answer if you don't want to. Why are you in the garage with your phone when we meet online for class?" The student smiled and replied, "No problem—that is easy to answer. Our internet service in this rural area is not that great. The garage gets the best reception. Besides, I have younger siblings who are doing home schooling and they are using the desktop computer. They are a big distraction!
Online learning experiences generally are defined as those that rely on the internet and different digital devices (e.g., laptops, smartphones) conducted in either a synchronous or asynchronous fashion. When people blithely suggest that "everything is online now", this does not acknowledge those without such resources. The fundamental requirement of online teaching—reliable internet access and hardware—may not be within reach for many families, even in a wealthy country such as the United States (Devine et al., 2020; Fishbane & Tomer, 2020). A Pew Research Center report estimated that five million children and nearly one-third (31.4%) of families with children ages 6–17 with family incomes below $50,000 do not have a high-speed internet; this group represents about 40% of all families with school-age children in the United States (Horrigan, 2015). Further challenges to online learning include poor internet access, home environments unconducive to online learning, student difficulties with self-discipline and self-directed learning, lack of professional development for faculty, absence of holistic quality assurance systems, and means of supporting not only students' academic learning outcomes, but also their social and emotional development (Zhu & Liu, 2020). Thrust into emergency remote teaching, a survey of K-12 educators indicated that they struggled to find high-quality tools, locate curated content aligned with standards and curriculum, use digital tools effectively, communicate with students at a distance, support student engagement/persistence, and adapt teaching material to the conditions and needs of particular students (Rasmitadila et al., 2020; Trust & Whalen, 2020). Unprecedented long-term closure of schools and suspension of face-to-face teaching during the COVID-19 crisis surely has reduced opportunities to learn for students, particularly those of young children. In terms of social-emotional development, most children have lost the equivalent of a year or more of interaction with peers in group settings.
The young child's particular need to be actively involved and the fact that many of them are not yet reading, writing, or adept at computer keyboards makes them the least well-suited for online approaches. Interestingly, when articles were submitted for this Special Issue, some authors denied that they were in a philosophy/reality conflict. Instead, they argued that they had managed to keep developmentally appropriate practices, principles of social learning theory, and the Reggio Emilia approach intact. Such assertions ring hollow when one considers that everything on that list is rooted in child-initiated/child-directed activity, play-based/hands-on learning, and dynamic interpersonal interactions with peers and teachers. In a case study of young children in the South Pacific region during COVID-19, one young child poignantly captured the difference between online and in-person teaching by asking, "When are we going to have the real school?" (Dayal & Tiko, 2020). COVID-19 has changed early childhood education at every level, from infant care to post-doctoral study.
Theme 4: Restructuring of Higher Education and Scholarship Interrupted
A new assistant professor of early childhood education is waiting to find out if she has lost her job at the university. She is a single mother whose daughter has special needs and they relocated to the area the previous year. If she is unemployed, she also has no health insurance—in the middle of a global health crisis. Prior to COVID-19, her employer's financial situation was precarious due to declining undergraduate enrollment. Now that the institution was forced to make prorated refunds of tuition, room, and board to residential students, things have spun out of control. All of the faculty members in the Department feel threatened because programs are being discontinued and departments are being merged or even eliminated. The administration suggests that one way to "save" a new colleague from unemployment is for the most senior professors to submit their retirement letters. Within the Department, there have been many stressful online meetings about how to schedule and staff the courses that students need to graduate, provide practicum experiences, and meet certification/licensure requirements. Throughout this upheaval, the instructor is contacted frequently by her students. They are understandably worried that they will not be adequately prepared to teach and that jobs will not be waiting for them upon graduation.
There is little doubt that COVID-19 has resulted in drastic changes to Academia. Lockdowns forced higher education to implement distance education almost overnight (Carillo & Flores, 2020), a situation commonly referred to as "flying the airplane while we are building it". The switch to digital communication also made faculty available to students across time zones, blurring the lines between work and family. It was assumed that all faculty members could broadcast from their residence and maintain a professional presence, including parents who now had responsibility for home schooling. In a study of 1148 academics in the United Kingdom, the researchers noted that college/university faculty have been "thrust headlong into providing for their students exclusively via a digital interface" and, for many, "this has been an unusual, disorienting, and even unwelcome experience" (Watermeyer et al., 2020, unpaged). A new instructor and doctoral student, Benjamin Green, observed: "So I am now confronted with the task of undoing all of my prejudices and biases against the digital pedagogical revolution, hoping, praying that I can evolve quickly enough to provide my students with an educational experience that overcomes the obstacles present within an education system grappling against a semi-apocalyptic viral pandemic" (Peters et al., 2020, unpaged). College-level instructors also had to form partnerships with instructional technology colleagues during a time when everyone was scrambling to salvage the semester and figure out ways to engage their students from a distance (Bloom et al., 2020). Instructors without training in online course design resorted to whatever was available and familiar, such as TED Talks, YouTube videos, and massive online open courses (MOOCs). Some wrote and published about their efforts, such as Grissom (2020) who described using the professionally produced Colorin` Colorado videos of teachers of English to simulate a classroom observation and model reflective practice.
Yet digital solutions were not without their drawbacks, and some of them related to security issues (Szente, 2020). Some hackers crashed online class meetings, awkward images were broadcast, and confidential materials became public. To avoid panic, faculty downplayed the disruptions and pressed on. Methods of assessment were shaken to their core as professors struggled to maintain the integrity of the evaluation process on tests, projects, and papers. Institutions with better infrastructures for online learning had an obvious advantage, as did the tech-savvy faculty members, who navigated the transition more easily; however, neither covering content nor evaluating written work was the hardest part.
The most formidable problem was providing practical work experience and internships (Kidd & Murray, 2020; Marinoni, et al., 2020). Simulations had various limitations, field placements were unavailable, and opportunities to observe early childhood educators teaching, limited. Some instructors encouraged their students to make their own local arrangements to observe or interview young children. In instances where a student was struggling, the situation was even more acute. The numerous, direct observations gathered during student teaching that were necessary to justify the hard decision not to recommend certification were not available.
Internationally, mental health problems account for about one-third of the world's disability among adults and these issues escalate during deadly disease outbreaks (Otu et al., 2020). Even before the pandemic, there was a mental health crisis in college students (American College Health Association, 2018; Shackle, 2019). Forced isolation compounded students' problems because, "The university experience would fundamentally alter for many students, especially undergraduates who would no longer experience a unique life-stage of social learning and development and lead to the abandonment of higher education as a socially immersive and participatory learning experience" (Watermeyer et al., 2020). For many students, worries about health and safety made it difficult to concentrate on studies, academic enthusiasm waned, and faint hopes of future employment undermined persistence at program completion.
During COVID-19 lockdowns and quarantines throughout the world, the mental health issues of adolescents and college students surfaced or were exacerbated (Aristovnik et al., 2020; Gritsenk et al., 2020). Among international students, the circumstances frequently were even worse (Stewart et al., 2021). Travel bans were instituted, campus housing faced shutdowns, finances depleted, and visa restrictions became problematic. International students had traveled great distances expecting to be immersed in a new culture and hoping to develop greater proficiency in another language, only to find themselves isolated and working from a computer. In a qualitative study of faculty and students involved in international university programs, they used the words "painful", "heartbroken", and "crestfallen" to describe their experiences during the COVID-19 lockdown (Peters et al., 2020).
As student support services were curtailed or even discontinued, faculty members were available 24/7 through digital means and were contacted frequently by needy, stressed, anxious, fearful, and panic-stricken students. Professors had concerns about "assuming levels of responsibility for students' welfare that often exceeded their expertise and training, what might be reasonably asked of them, and moreover their contractual and thus legal obligations" (Watermeyer et al., 2020). Nevertheless, respondents in a study of 30,383 students from 62 countries during the first wave of COVID-19 crisis in early 2020 rated faculty members as the most satisfactory source of support (Aristovnik et al., 2020).
The need to provide more support to family members, restructure course delivery, revise policies/programs/planning, attend to students' needs, and support distressed colleagues. "Zoom fatigue" was such a pervasive phenomenon that National Geographic published an article explaining why the online meetings were so dissatisfying (Sklar, 2020). They failed to provide what only face-to-face events can offer: "the electricity of real-time idea exchange, the expansion of possibilities that come with open debate, the connectivity of human warmth and emotion" (Bloom et al., 2020).
Scholarly work has suffered too—so much so that some institutions gave faculty another year to work toward tenure. Researchers saw their plans for data collection and analysis postponed or even abandoned, and some of their support personnel, such as graduate assistants, were unavailable. Finding the time and place to complete scholarly work was another hurdle (Cutri et al., 2020) as home offices were repurposed into online college classrooms or became places to home school children. Professional organizations with annual conferences as a major source of revenue were forced to cancel these important events in the lives of scholars. The networking and collaborative projects that often are initiated at these gatherings were greatly diminished and some scholarly publishers, already operating on slim profit margins, faltered and failed.
Human beings have been battered and beaten in so many ways by this highly transmittable and health-jeopardizing virus. Think about the terminology that is in use throughout the world to describe our current situation: disaster, pandemic, global health crisis, national emergency, lockdown, quarantine, stay-at-home order, and Draconian measures. There is little question that the steps taken internationally to halt the spread of COVID-19 have exacted a heavy toll on our lives. Despite the overwhelming negativity, hope remains because "times of crisis and disruption offer opportunities for resilience, growth and extraordinary development" (Witt et al., 2020, p. 3).
On the Other Side of the Pandemic
Indian novelist/activist Arundhati Roy (2020) suggests a more positive metaphor for the COVID-19 crisis; that of a portal. It is a pathway that leads to a reconfigured future and we stand on a threshold leading to that journey. What possible good might come from managing to prevail in the time of coronavirus?
Promotion of Ethical Practices/Policies, Global Perspectives, and Collaborative Scholarship
The COVID-19 situation is the consummate unstructured problem that confounds efforts to solve it in a linear, stepwise fashion. Effective responses thus far have highlighted the survival skill set of the future, namely: global perspectives, multidisciplinary collaboration, innovative thinking, and principled practice.