Boston-Area Learning Pods During the COVID-19 Pandemic: How Parents' Social Networks Limit Integration in Urban Schools

• In Event: Extrapolating Success for Historically Marginalized Groups in Space Beyond K–12

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with parents of public-school students in who joined learning pods for the 2020-21 school year, this paper argues that the COVID-19 pandemic may have had a narrowing effect on the worlds of children in ways that increase their socio-spatial isolation along vectors of race and class. Interviews with parents who started learning pods never mentioned race or social class as criteria for “podding up” with other families; instead, parents emphasized the importance of evaluating “risk profiles” and “exposures” of prospective families. Given the racialized and classed nature of the pandemic, pod parents’ processes of selecting podmates reveals a great deal about the continuing segregated nature of American life, even in heterogenous areas.

Author

• Jennifer C. LaFleur, Brandeis University