Reply to this assignment to post your entry. You could post a poem, an essay, an exchange, or a monolog. Write from the point of view of a student, a sibling, a parent, a coach, and/or more than one p.o.v.
Below is the draft conference abstract (i.e., session overview) I wrote for our upcoming conference. Notice how I integrated some credible sources.
Lessons from the COVID-19 Lockdown: From “Learning Loss” to Resilience and Learning Gains in Communities of Color
Facilitated by Anita Pandey & Tarrolyn Barras
Department of English & Language Arts
Since the COVID-19 school closure period, research on how students fared and on how they learn has become a transdisciplinary endeavor and not one confined to fields like education and psychology. The Institute of Education Sciences, a U.S. Department of Education subdivision shares that “an estimated three million students are missing from school as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.” Due to the pandemic, “learning loss” (Foust, 2021) has been exacerbated for many more students–and for a protracted period. While COVID-19-prompted learning loss has been widely reported, the full scale, breadth, and national impact of this loss of learning is unclear.
Through personal accounts shared in the fall of 2022 by 140 students at Morgan State University, many of whom played multiple roles during the lockdown (e.g., as parents and siblings), this panel aims to gauge the full scope and impact of this loss on students and families of color, so that mitigation strategies could be proposed, implemented, and tracked. We hypothesize that the academic loss is most starkly visible for low-income Black and Hispanic children. We contend that the “loss” was, in some cases, accompanied by sometimes immeasurable gains that must also be acknowledged. Indeed, out-of-class learning experiences have been known to positively impact classroom learning (Pandey, 2018, 2010).
In this session, panelists will share their experiences with what experts have termed “learning loss” (Ibid) as well as with “COVID-19 learning gain(s),” a term we propose. What do we mean by “learning gain(s)”? We use this term to refer to the independent learning, coaching, service learning, working, and other “out-of-class” knowledge and skills (e.g., motivational, money-, and time-management) that some students simultaneously gained. Noteworthy and inspiring examples of learning loss and of learning gains, as well as of resilience during the COVID-19 lockdown from communities of color across the country spotlighted, archived and subsequently compared by two applied linguists (to ensure greater inter-rater reliability). Selected submissions that will be showcased include essays, literature reviews, visualizations, and poems. The panel will end by outlining implications and directions for future research, and the accounts shared will become part of a proposed repository podcast titled The Audio Essay.
Selected References
Foust, Armanda. 2021. Strategies to Help Mitigate Learning Loss, REL Central (ed.gov)
