The COVID-19 Diaries: Identity, Teaching, and Learning at a Crossroads

Abstract

Despite the fact that American education has at its core strived to provide pathways of opportunity to remedy socio-economic inequalities, as educational institutions transitioned into online virtual classrooms due to the COVID-19 pandemic these inequalities have come into sharper focus for us. During the process of engaging in a larger self-study, we became more aware of the stark socio-economic disparities of our students in a virtual space, specifically amongst students of color, and how these disparities affected learning outcomes and their identity. Juxta positioning the situated in-between spaces of in-class and virtual environments our identities as educators were fluid and intersectional, negotiated in response to student interactions thereby enabling changes in our Dialogical Selves. The sample for this study consisted of 2 faculty members and 40 students. Data sources included reflexive journals, recorded class sessions, students' questionnaires, and artifacts such as student feedback collected through “exit tickets” as well as recorded meetings. Some findings include (1) students' identities were negotiated differently in face to face classrooms vs. virtual classrooms, (2) fluidity in intersectional identity due to intersections of I-positions in the dialogical self, and (3) acknowledging and accepting the presence of COVID-19 created a sense of community in the virtual classroom (4) incorporating self-care and caring pedagogical practices provided an empowering space for students and educators.

“We Will Appreciate Each Other More After This”: Teachers' Construction of Collective and Personal Identities During Lockdown

“…We were aware that employing a research design that involved the recruitment of large numbers of participants may slow the research process, and in doing so prevent us from accessing data on the immediate perspectives and concerns of teachers during the first few weeks of the lockdown in England. Our study, which collected rich qualitative data from a small sample, was aligned with a number of other small-scale educational studies conducted during the early stages of the Covid-19 crisis (Anderson et al, 2020 ; Kim and Asbury, 2020 ; Sequeira and Dacey, 2020 ; Ferguson et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Corpus linguistic analysis of data is facilitated through specialized computer programs. In this project, analysis of pronoun use within the interview data was undertaken using Wordsmith 7.0 (Scott, 2016), which facilitated the construction of wordlists (frequency counts of words within a specific corpus) and concordances (which show all the occurrences of a target word within their context, to reveal linguistic patterns and associations). Corpus linguistics is a comparatively "young discipline that is [.…”

Diarios de la pandemia

“…No obstante, con el paso del tiempo se está acrecentando paulatinamente la bibliografía sobre la pandemia surgida de la investigación social empírica. En este sentido, contamos ya con un buen número de estudios que se han centrado en analizar cómo las transformaciones sociales generadas por la pandemia han afectado emocionalmente a los estudiantes universitarios en distintos lugares del mundo: Europa (Burns et al, 2020;Caparrós Martín, et al, 2021;Csillag & Hidegh, 2020;Lozano-Díaz, Fernández-Prados, et al, 2020), América Latina (Hernández Ferrer & Valencia Aguilar, 2021;Gandulfo, Alegre, & Domínguez, 2020;Reyes & Trujillo, 2021) y Estados Unidos (Sequeira & Dacey, 2020), entre otros. Destaca, en este sentido, el estudio realizado por Aristovnik y sus colaboradores (2020) a partir de una encuesta aplicada a una muestra de más de 30000 estudiantes, de 62 países distintos, donde se subraya como ciertas variables sociodemográficas y geopolíticas afectan a las distintas emociones expresadas por los estudiantes y a sus formas de lidiar con la incertidumbre generada por la pandemia.…”

Student Experiences and Equity during Emergency Remote Teaching in U.S. Higher Institutions: A Literature Review

“…Researchers revealed that student motivation and engagement tended to decrease after the sudden transition to ERT (Aguilera-Hermida, 2020). Students, disproportionately those from the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum, did not feel comfortable participating in live activities and failed to show up regularly in virtual classrooms (Sequeira & Dacey, 2020). Some students found it difficult to fully engage during quarantine due to a lack of sufficient study space and constant distractions (Qadir, 2020).…”

“…On the other hand, although digital equipment and internet access did not constitute a sizable barrier for US college students, its reliability and stability nevertheless hampered a part of the population (Katz et al, 2021). Additionally, underprivileged and vulnerable students lost motivation due to technological constraints, a lack of supporting facilities, and poor digital skills (Sequeira & Dacey, 2020). These findings underscore the existing disparities in access to support and opportunities during ERT and the importance of implementing more caring pedagogical approaches to learn about and empower learners (Sequeira & Dacey, 2020).…”