Where Does Learning Happen?
If not in the classroom, where?
From the Ides of March 2020 until the summer of 2021, most students found themselves in isolation. The impact of this loss of learning, social and emotional development, and post-traumatic stress are with us now and will continue to present in the future. No matter how hard we as teachers worked, the fundamental loss of a physical space made school easy to tune out of. Despite software to monitor student work on their devices and digital curricula, keeping student attention and interest at the high school level was practically impossible.
Like the young woman in the photo, most students spent their days in bed. Lucky students had an entire bedroom to shut themselves up in an artificial night a la Act One Romeo, but many students had that single piece of furniture: a bed. Their only changing view came from the digital screens with them. Hunched over Chromebooks, knockoff AirPods playing Spotify or Pandora from their phones, they spent months in tiny spaces with no outlet other than the internet. Their only window was digital, and the doors were closed.
They found ways to spend the wasteful days. When allowed out into the world again, when forced by the actual law to make the physical movement from bed to campus, those ways weren’t given up nor unlearned. TikTok exploded, and live streaming became standardized as a way of life. The World Wide Web has become a landmine of disinformation and cheaply produced “content.”
“Content” is what they want. What is it? Content can be a rerun of “The "Golden Girls.” Content can be a BuzzFeed quiz. Content can be a man live-streaming himself having a manic episode. Content can be a short video of someone getting smacked in the head. Content can be the latest pirated movie, video gameplay, or the thousands of free-to-download game apps for personal devices. What we used to call “entertainment” is now “content.”
So, let’s try that. Wedging educational content into the social media sphere is a popular genre of content creation, though most of it focuses on preschool and elementary-level education. Public education does not have the backing, financially or politically, to engage students as it could before the pandemic lockdown for the simple reason that the students themselves are different. They are not location-based in their behavior; they are the same people no matter where they are located, without any care of civil behavior as it used to exist.
Perhaps we can teach some of those things that we used to learn in school through “content.” If students don’t or can’t pay attention to the teacher or lesson, they might pay attention to something else. Teachers are advised to bring the world inside their classroom. Maybe it’s time to leave the classroom and be outside in that world.