The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of education within the United States. The standardized testing and accountability regimes are under siege by teachers, parents, and students who have realized that individual student growth and emotional support need to be the driving factors in schools. In order to recenter education upon the students, schools are going to have to expand their understanding of the concept of diversity beyond the black/white polarity, appreciate the idea of multiple intelligences, support the different ways pupils learn and demonstrate their knowledge, and revisit higher education's fixation on standardized entrance examinations as part of the admissions process. The reformulating of American education is not a novel idea but one that dates back to the early 1900s and merges back into the stream of educational systems across the globe.
TopIntroduction
The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and social justice movements started in 2020 have awakened educators, administrators, and the general public to the realities of diverse classrooms and diverse learners (Jones, 2021; Walters, 2020). Differentiation and diversity were already topics covered in teacher preparation programs and professional development sessions, but the reality of how these concepts affected students was mainly glossed over by mass education bureaucracies (Sahlberg, 2021).
The following chapter focuses attention on how the repercussions for student learning have awakened a movement to truly revolutionize how learning must be student-centered and how our overall impressions of learning and achievement must be updated (Aguliera, E. & Nightengale-Lee, B., 2020; Cipriano et al., 2020). The self-fulfilling ideology of good students reflect grading scores of As, and poor students reflect grading scores of Ds and Fs, was turned on its head as educators had to deal with the emotional traumas endured by their students during the pandemic. Teachers and educational administrators saw non-pedagogical effects on student achievement firsthand.
Home life became a sticking point for teachers preoccupied with their mythical idea of what good students look like and accomplish. The curriculum no longer became the sole object of learning but rather an aspect of life that needed to be manipulated to achieve goals for students with different experiences. Hybrid learning introduced a new challenge for teachers to create multiple lessons to engage students that could no longer be told to stay in a chair and read quietly (Sumandiyar et al., 2021).
COVID-19 was a momentous event in everyone’s lives who experienced the pain and heartbreak of death, hospitalization, job loss, quarantine, and isolation. Suppose one is to identify a silver lining, then perhaps the effects on education due to the pandemic could be an educational revolution that benefits all future students. The rethinking of the equity of education will have reverberating effects on teaching for decades to come, with the focus centering on “whole child” education rather than information memorization for accountability testing (Coch, 2021).
Despite the tone-deaf mandate of continuing standardized testing during a pandemic, frontline educators regained their humanity towards students with the shift from content to student wellness. Teachers who joined the ranks of educators to support and foster growth in children recaptured their vision of educating students rather than teaching an inanimate subject. The struggles of the pandemic affected everyone, perhaps not equally, but for one of the first times, most Americans, and especially students and teachers, were dealing with life-altering events at the same time.
The COVID-19 epidemic is forcing educators and educational institutions to rethink the entire manner and purpose of education. This chapter focuses on four critical elements of change that are quaking the educational system: the vastness of diversity, acceptance of multiple intelligences, the changing understanding of learning, and higher education’s reckoning with a biased merit system. These four pillars redefine learning in the classroom, and at the center of this reformulation are the individual learners within classrooms.
The understanding of the vastness of educational diversity is expanding within education (Banks, 2016). The diatribes of the black/white binary are being perceived through a much more inclusive awareness of the plethora of diversity issues facing our schools. Rather than focusing exclusively on the white/black opportunity gap, schools now recognize that diversity in classrooms also consists of socioeconomics, gender, linguistics, religion, sex, geography, and culture. The racial aspect of diversity, equity, and inclusion is still an essential aspect but is now bolstered by the realization that it is not simply a particular issue and that neo-segregated schools still face diverse learning challenges for their students.
Although Howard Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences has been required learning for educators for decades, the shift to a more learner-centered pedagogy and methodologies due to the pandemic has brought forward the need to understand what multiple intelligences mean for student success in the classroom (Young, 2020). Educators are beginning to utilize multiple means of engagement, representation, and expression to gauge and assess student learning. The widespread utilization of Universal Design for Learning is strengthening this movement towards a spectrum understanding of learning rather than a static measurement of success, including learner-focused assessments (Basham et al., 2020).