Supporting Black, Indigenous, and Students of Color in Learning Environments Transformed by COVID-19

Abstract

This article sheds light on the challenges that Black, Indigenous, and students of color in the U.S. face in dealing with uncertainties and prejudice caused by the worldwide pandemic. It provides recommendations on culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining teaching strategies based on the cultural competence model (Pedersen, 1994; Sue, 2001; Sue et al., 1992;) and curriculum reframing. Teachers of Black, Indigenous, and students of color around the world will find this article particularly useful because there are limited research-based recommendations applicable to schools in the U.S. and around the world.

Access and Inclusion of Students with Disabilities in Virtual Learning Environments: Implications for Post-Pandemic Teaching

“…These discrepancies reminded educators of the impacts that students' home lives had on their long-term academic success, but they also showed how instrumental collaborative partnerships with school personnel are in ensuring equity and access to learning. For many educators, this collaboration required them to rethink existing biases and assumptions about parent participation, especially parents from economically poor, marginalized communities, who often served as essential workers and thus, in many instances, were not able to provide direct instruction because they simply were working outside the home (Mize & Glover, 2021).…”

Confronting (de)humanizing remote teaching practices

“…The COVID-19 crisis has disproportionately impacted vulnerable populations. Lack of access to technology, increased levels of loss, unstable residential status, food insecurity, increased rates of psychological and emotional distress, and detrimental health consequences have all affected students of color and those from resource-limited communities (Dorn et al, 2020; Mize and Glover, 2021). The limited access to childcare assistance became even worse for families living in poverty conditions (Malik et al, 2020).…”

Flexible Learning Environments: Minoritized College Students’ Experiences in HyFlex

“…Wildcat et al (2014) elucidated, "If colonization is fundamentally about dispossessing Indigenous peoples from land, decolonization must involve forms of education that reconnect Indigenous peoples to land and the social relations, knowledges and languages that arise from the land" (p. 1). Although there is an Indigenous resurgence movement for which land-based decolonization is particularly relevant (Gaudry & Lorenz, 2018;Wildcat et al, 2014), there is a wider spectrum of scholars calling for a wider array of culturally relevant, responsive, and sustaining practices in online education (Hunt & Oyarzun, 2020;Ladson-Billings, 1995Mize & Glover, 2021;Vogel, 2020) to promote critical consciousness and decolonize education. It is not far-fetched to expect that good online practices should by extension serve as good HyFlex practices generally.…”

“…Though not the only one, Josephine was the most vocal about expressing the need to fulfill these 153 four domains and the need to decolonize education and infuse Indigenous culture in HyFlex (and in the overall college experience). Mize and Glover (2021) brought to light the educational inequities confronting Indigenous students and other students of color, which became exacerbated during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The authors argue students of color have experienced compounding levels of loss during this pandemic; they explained: For students from families whose incomes fell near or below the national poverty line, access to technology became an immediate concern.…”

“…Although they generally liked their teachers, they stated they would like to see more Indigenous representation in the faculty ranks and in the general college experience. Mize and Glover (2021) highlighted this issue of cultural imbalance and lack of representation. Minoritized students do not see themselves reflected enough in the faculty ranks.…”