From Ring Around the Rosie to Zombie Tag: Children (Re)Learning School Sociality During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: Illuminating Sociality and Learning in Diverse Educational Environments by Interrogating Movement, Touch, and Affect

Abstract

Much public discourse during the Covid-19 pandemic has been devoted to how adults experienced it as a tremendous unsettling of their lives and relations, albeit in diverse and uneven ways (Orellana et al., forthcoming). But how did children make sense of the disruptions to their friendships and of their social and educational lives and the transition period, when they prepared to return to school in person?

Theoretically, this project is underpinned by the “New Sociology and Anthropology of Childhoods” (Bluebond-Langner & Korbin 2007; James & Prout 1997) which emphasizes children’s perspectives and agency in their own social worlds — perspectives that are, conspicuously, often overlooked in educational research. Our work is further informed by Merleau-Ponty’s (1964) notion of “intercorporeality,” as well as on interactional approaches to how embodied practices (including touching and being touched by others) shape social relations (Goffman 1983; Cekaite and Goodwin 2021) and learning (García-Sánchez, 2017; Johnson 2017). This paper examines how children negotiated new haptic rituals in games and learning interactions that enhanced their sociality, while being Covid-safe.

Based on a classroom research study conducted at the critical juncture when schools started to reopen in Winter/Spring 2021, this paper examines how young children (ages 5-6) in a dual language immersion program in a major metropolitan area in Southern California navigated the unsettling of school sociality during the Covid-19 pandemic and how they built new landscapes of social life in schools once they resumed in-person instruction.
The research team (two university professors and a dual-language Kindergarten teacher) designed and implemented classroom activities that, while integrating the pedagogical aims of the Spanish-English bilingual curriculum, also allowed children to express their feelings about the pandemic, their experiences with Zoom classrooms, and their understanding of safety rules upon return to school. In addition to participant observation (via Zoom) and video recording of these classroom activities and discussions, data collection included collection of children’s classroom work (writing, art, drawings, photo-journals) related to these topics. The visual arts component strengthened children’s investment and leadership in the research project.
A recurrent issue that arose in all these different kinds of data we collected was children’s preoccupation with their corporeal “being-in the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1964) with their peers in ways that allowed them both to play together and to follow the Covid-safety rules instituted by the school. At a time where Covid severely restricted social intercorporeality, children reflected on the critical importance of touch and physical closeness to forge relationships in class activities. They creatively negotiated these restrictions by, for example, inventing versions of traditional games (e.g. tag) that limited tactile interaction.
In keeping with this year’s theme that challenges us to interrogate research in pursuit of truth and to democratize knowledge production, this paper argues for the importance of talking and listening to young children as we theorize connections between learning, intercorporeality, sociality, and schools. By centering children’s voices in the very design of our studies and collaborations, this paper captures an often-ignored and underappreciated but highly significant perspective on the socio-emotional effects of the pandemic.

Authors

• Inmaculada Maria Garcia Sanchez, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author

• Marjorie E. Faulstich Orellana, University of California - Los Angeles
  Presenting Author