Abstract
COVID-19 has introduced a new “normal.” During the pandemic, parents of young children and parents of children enrolled in special education have had to assume the role and so perform as teachers. Teachers have had to find ways to include parents who are willing to serve as de facto teachers. In addition to findings from the Ontario Alliance of Black School Educators (ONABSE) webinar series in 2020, this chapter also draws on other publicly available online documents to reveal the ever-changing education landscape in Ontario, Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Family literacy was examined broadly through family engagement practices. This chapter shows that there is no one essential story emerging from the pandemic. To date, very few stories have been told of the students who have blossomed and flourished during the pandemic. By gathering stories of the thoughts and actions of Black educators and parents, the chapter augments the existing literature on home-school-community partnerships in Ontario.
TopIntroduction
Some parents were very excited and another group of parents … found it difficult to have their children in front of other students…specifically for Black parents, there was a conversation about the feeling of safety of having your children at home and not having to send them into the school system. I thought I was the only parent that felt that way, but … about 60 of us were talking about that. The idea that I was just able to see what my child was learning: I was able to connect with them; help them to develop that critical consciousness about what they were learning… We talked about the miseducation of our children…we were holding them close … So, those were some of the collective responses that I heard from parents.
— Educator, parent, and community advocate (ONABSE 2020, June 16)
It has been widely accepted globally that the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated, refocused, and highlighted inequities inherent within systems of education, locally, regionally, and internationally. At the height of the pandemic, in every nation state, public health imperatives required a deliberate transition from traditional school practices to virtual school environments (Schleicher, 2020). In Canada, federal and provincial leaders mandated that school buildings were to be closed and so school boards made the transition to online education (LaBonte et al, 2021). There was no notice period; there was no warning before the onslaught of COVID-19. Seemingly overnight in the province of Ontario, Canada, the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated a transition that transformed homes into schools in that parents became teachers. This was especially true of parents of young children and parents of disabled students at any age who live with impairments and are deemed by educators to be “exceptional.” Parents had to adjust their own schedules to support their children’s learning (Gallagher-Mackay et al, 2021; Underwood et al, 2021). The transition from the school building to the students’ homes meant that parents were expected to help their children to adjust physically and psychologically to the sudden transition to a virtual educational environment (Chen & Greenwood, 2021; Underwood et al, 2021). During the transition and well into the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, parents taught children how to adapt to the new normal of the online teaching and learning environment, where the teacher was on the screen as opposed to being in close physical proximity to the student. Parents had to acquire the necessary technology (device, equipment, internet connection) to connect their children with virtual school.
This transition to the virtual classroom necessitated changes in perspectives and adjustments in teaching and learning, alike (Gallagher-Mackay et al, 2021; LaBonte et al, 2021; Schleicher, 2020). On each side of the dark glass—looking at the other through the computer screen—within the confines of less-than-perfect distance/remote education settings, and specifically during synchronous online education, there is the teacher and the student, and often parents and other household members. The dark glass suggests that there can be vision distortion; by extension the dark glass is symbolic of a barrier that thwarts understanding and prevents full engagement between home and school. As the opening vignette suggests, the transition to virtual school during the COVID-19 pandemic provided opportunities for parents and educators to engage, but it also facilitated the surveillance of students and educators, on both sides of the glass. Parents could see and hear what was happening in the classrooms, and educators could see and hear what was happening in the home, even though students had the right to mute their microphones and turn off their cameras, in the province of Ontario.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Black People: All who claim African ancestry and heritage.
Special Education: Additional services or resources for “exceptional” students with learning disabilities, physical disabilities, developmental disabilities, behavioural, emotional or communication disorders, or those deemed to be “gifted.”
Race: A social construct which explains the dominance and the hierarchical experience of difference, inequalities, and inequities resulting from Whiteness. Race, like gender and class, has social and material implications that inform socio-cultural ontological understandings of inequity and inequality in educational spaces.
ONABSE (Ontario Alliance of Black School Educators): A not-for-profit community organization that serves teachers, administrators and parents in Ontario, Canada. ( www.onabse.org AU56: The URL www.onabse.org has been redirected to https://www.onabse.org/. Please verify the URL. ).
Agents: Persons working on behalf of, with a view to securing the best interests of Black students in the Ontario educational system.
Mother: The gendered role, associated with the female parent and anyone who does mother-work, or who performs duties typically and traditionally assumed to be performed by the female parent in home-school relations.
Family Engagement and Parental Involvement: Terms such as family engagement, parental involvement, and parental engagement are used interchangeably in this chapter to indicate all levels and types of family and parental participation in their children’s education and schooling.
Disability and Impairment: Impairment is the medical or clinical condition that affects a person’s ability to engage. Disability includes the impairment and the social or environmental conditions that obstruct or affect a person’s ability to engage.