Surviving the Storm: Family Adjustments to Learning From Home

• In Event: Learning, Living, and Teaching in Dual Pandemic: Experiences of Minoritized K–12 Educational Stakeholders

Abstract

Purpose
When speaking about COVID 19’s impact on differing communities, Gloria Ladson Billings points out that while the COVID 19 storm affected everyone, the resources that enabled us to weather it were vastly different (2020). In this qualitative study, we explored the impact of the transition to remote learning as felt by predominantly Latinx families participating in a desegregation busing program.

Focusing on the learning opportunities for students participating in a school busing program, this paper explores the following questions:
● How did family life shift for families during the transition to at-home learning in the early months of the Covid 19 pandemic?
● What opportunities and previously overlooked resources did families draw on to meet their children’s academic needs?
● How did the school support these families who, while full members of the district community, are not members of the affluent town in which the district is situated?

Theoretical framework
This research study is guided by a sociocultural framework, recognizing the measured approaches and explorations of purported gaps in opportunities and learning during the pandemic period. In particular, this framework acknowledges the cultural and historical knowledge, identities, and individual agency that shapes where and how learning manifests with others and across time (Gutierrez et al., 2017).

Our study does confirm multiple ways particular dimensions of equity have fallen far short of the needs of historically marginalized families--such as space, materials and guidance--this study also challenges the framing of “loss.”

Data sources
Data from this study comes from semi-scripted interviews conducted with half of the families (15) participating in the regional busing program. Using a combination of pre-defined coding categories as well as emergent codes, the authors identified themes pertaining to how families responded to the COVID 19 crisis as it impacted their families’ lives.

Results
The findings from this study reveal that participating families navigated the unfolding needs related to this new educational context through a variety of means. In seeking to make up for these omissions, parents drew on resources to provide additional academic support as well as social-emotional support for their children.

We outline three different themes for how parents met the needs of their children during the pandemic. First, they resisted blaming schools, despite ongoing frustration with how some academic programs were enacted. Second, these families leveraged funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 1992) to sustain school-based learning practices in the spaces where they felt formal education fell short. Finally, parents described how they supported the non-academic needs of their children, such as social and emotional growth, considering such practices were not geographically or digitally provided by school communities. Taken collectively these findings trouble the notion of “learning loss” as parents expressed concerns over the type of education their children were receiving.

Scholarly significance
Just as the binary between youth and adult learning must be challenged (e.g. Voussoughi et al., 2021), so too do we see a theme in our findings that reinforces the capabilities of parents (and students) to helm the direction and journeys of school-based learning.

Authors

• Stephanie Robillard, St. Mary's College of California

• Antero Garcia, Stanford University

• Jorge Eduardo Garcia, Stanford University

• Miroslav Suzara, Stanford University