3 minutes
The health crisis affecting us since March 2020 has changed much of our daily life.
Group activities have been restricted to protect us from coronavirus and avoid overwhelming our countries' health care systems.
One essential activity that has been particularly affected is education. UNESCO emphasizes that “schools must be the first to open and the last to close,” but even so, putting that principle into practice is not so simple.
Schools have now had to reinvent themselves and radically modify teaching and learning methods.
The most vulnerable populations have been most affected by this reinvention. According to UNESCO, 100 million children will not achieve minimum reading proficiency as a result of the health crisis. This is one of the most striking figures.
Latin America is among the regions particularly affected, but the news is not all bad.
Although health professionals are on the front line during the pandemic, educators have also been fighting educational challenges a year into the health crisis.
Benefits of the digital age
We do not know what the future holds, but we do know we will be better prepared thanks to technological advances.
To avoid seeing everything in a negative light and try to see the glass as half full, we can say that if this pandemic had struck fifty years ago, for example, we would not have had the same educational response capacity. Today we have far more digital resources than we did fifty years ago.
Digital resources are now part of everyday life
This realignment of strategies has given teachers much greater freedom to use online resources. Many, especially older teachers, have had to undergo a forced transition to digital strategies.
Some existing online resources have been discovered—or rediscovered for new purposes—and teachers have seen opportunities to use them to generate greater student interest.
Students independently, and parents themselves, have now chosen to make greater use of online resources such as video platforms, audiobooks, podcasts, online encyclopedias, and anything else they can find online to research and complete assignments.
Challenges for students and parents
The challenge has not been limited to teachers. Students and parents have likewise found themselves in difficult positions when dealing with these forced changes.
Younger students need more parental assistance, which creates the potential for widening inequality, since parents' educational levels and the time they can devote to children's schoolwork differ between households, with historically disadvantaged groups once again suffering greater harm.
These are the situations in which educational organizations or the state must intervene to help students, teachers, and parents. Ideally, support should address:
- Technical and pedagogical support for teachers: because school and educational institution closures were administrative rather than pedagogical decisions, many teachers do not know how to handle these matters properly.
- Forced changes always have emotional consequences: that is why mental health support is important for both teachers and students.
- Attention to the most vulnerable students: vulnerable communities need particular attention. One of the most common situations among the most vulnerable students is having no internet connection for activities. Many must therefore go to school or an acquaintance's home to study and complete their work.
Although living in this technological era benefits many people involved in education, access to various tools is unequal. As individuals, we can also help make this reality affect our students as little as possible. Simply being aware of it is already a step toward change.