The educational response to Covid-19 across two countries: a critical examination of initial digital pedagogy adoption

#Mathathome during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring and Reimagining Resources and Social Supports for Parents

“…Nonetheless, interpreting findings in relation to existing literature suggests that the experiences of parents described by our analyses likely provide insights into typical mathematics experiences during COVID-19 emergency remote instruction. Moreover, studies from around the world (e.g., Norway, Indonesia, Nigeria), which focused on broader educational experiences, showed a similar increase in parental involvement in schooling during the initial transition to remote instruction [23,[37][38][39][40]. Looking across findings from recent studies on parents' experiences with emergency remote instruction during the early stages of COVID-19 suggests that our findings have broader implications despite the large number of participants from the United States.…”

Special issue: Covid-19 and the role of technology and pedagogy on school education during a pandemic

“…High-tech homes had fast broadband and access to interactive learning activities through computers, and mid-tech homes had slow or unreliable Internet, shared devices or only mobile phones to access materials and interact with their teacher and other students. Digital inequities were identified in most of the articles in this special issue and were correlated with rural-urban divides (for example, Bokayev et al, 2021;Scully et al, 2021), socio-economic context of households (for example, Greenhow et al, 2020;Scully et al, 2021) and the cultural context such as restrictions on girls' access to the Internet (Khlaif et al, 2020). The level of technology available and the educational context influenced the pedagogical practices as students learnt through prerecorded instructional videos, interactive online lessons, educational television and printed resources.…”

“…Students in low-tech and low socio-economic households engaged less with learning (Scully et al, 2021). High-tech, high socio-economic households were likely to also be advantaged by correlating to parents with higher levels of education who could better support their children's learning (for example, Bokayev et al, 2021;Greenhow et al, 2020). This was particularly relevant for parents of younger children and children with special needs who played a significant role in their children's education during the pandemic (Palau et al, 2021;Parmigiani et al, 2020).…”

“…Unfortunately, in the current neoliberal global context, teachers are often situated as a 'problem'; rather than being celebrated, they are blamed for shortcomings (De Saxe et al, 2020). This is reflected within these articles in two ways: the first is a focus on assessment and accountability during the pandemic as identified in the US media (Greenhow et al, 2020), and the second is the critique of teachers' digital competence or online pedagogical practices. This selection of articles reflects that teachers work within national, local and schooling contexts which enhanced or limited their ability to respond in times of school closures and provides constructive insight to inform future support for teachers (for example, Howard et al, 2020).…”

“…US and UK media reports identified the tensions and contradictions within and between schooling, educational policy and home-learning during the Covid-19 period. The authors identified digital equity issues in both contexts with a greater coordinated response occurring in the UK national educational policy system than in the US, where parents received less support (Greenhow et al, 2020).…”