Home schooling
Over the last 9 months, my twins (currently in P6) have spent only four months actually going to school, being taught face to face while the rest has been spend at home, being home schooled. The term home schooling has taken on a completely different meaning over the last year; where it once pointed to a minority of children who were kept out of school in favour of a parent teaching them from home, it is now the norm for the vast majority of children. It has a technological aspect as well now, as teachers try to replicate the curriculum they are used to teaching in a face to face environment to whichever technology the school has decided to use.
This is maybe the first time in education that technology is not being used as an enhancement but as a necessity and on a grand scale previously unimagined. Using technology in this way, to replace face to face teaching, specifically for primary and secondary education, surely cannot be seen as an enhancement. But of course that was never the aim; it is solution of sorts in an emergency situation. It does provide us with a clear cut argument that technology is not separate from social or political influences. Educational technology is now being used in the majority of schools for teaching and that would not have been the case without the pandemic and the governments’ response to this.
Home schooling brings with it many questions, a lot of them social and health related; how does the stress of working from home and supporting children simultaneously effect working parents? How does the reduction in social contact effect the children (and adults too)? With children in many different circumstances, how can we make sure the most vulnerable children receive education?
But there are also questions around the educational use of technology: does using technology for all education lead to impoverished learning? How do children engage with the technology and how does that effect what they learn? Coming back to the question of technology – enhanced learning, I think the question can no longer be: will technology enhance learning? It should now be: how does technology impact learning? Or teaching, if you prefer.1
- Sian Bayne(2015) What’s the matter with ‘technology-enhanced learning’? Learning, Media and Technology, 40:1, 5-20, DOI: 1080/17439884.2014.915851 (p 9)
A good and reflective post. As you say, this is a situation of emergency remote teaching rather than well-crafted digital education. While there’s strong evidence that well-designed digital education is as effective in terms of learning as well-designed class-room teaching, that seems to omit the wider benefits of in-person education at least at school-level such as learning to socialise, to play and have a laugh, try new experiences (such as outdoor learning), learning to be at certain places at certain time, of dealing with tricky inter-personal situations, as well as the more ‘hands on’ learning in art, home economics, lab work for science etc.. So, yes, you final question on what is the impact of remote teaching and education is a really (or perhaps *the* really) important one.