Sharing stories of resilience
The coronavirus disrupted life around the world with K-12 schools shutting down to mitigate the spread of the virus.
As a result, teachers both nationally and internationally turned to digital tools and the internet to continue teaching students. Because of the unprecedented nature of the pandemic, no standard practices existed for educators to follow during this massive shift in classroom instruction.
Despite these interruptions, teachers who previously taught face-to-face continued to support students online, resulting in drastically different experiences among educators. To better understand how teachers were supported and prepared to teach with digital tools during the initial outbreak, as well as the beginning of fall semester, associate professor Tisha Lewis Ellison is conducting a mixed methods survey study, titled “Teaching During a Pandemic: How Teachers Used Digital Tools to Promote Learning,” to capture the stories of K-12 teachers around the world.
“Many teachers had to quickly shift from face-to-face to online learning, and a lot of them were very resilient,” said Lewis Ellison, who teaches in the Department of Language and Literacy Education. “Some of them had to teach without any assistance or support. They were scared. We see them as one of many frontline essential workers for our students, and we wanted to humanize their stories from the narratives they chose to write about in our surveys. We want to hear their stories.”