A Global Perspective on the Role of Universities Sustaining Educational Opportunity During the COVID-19 Pandemic

• In Event: How Universities Partnered With K–12 Schools During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Chile, Mexico, Russia, Qatar, and the United States.

Abstract

Based on a cross-case analysis of 22 case studies of university engagement with school systems during the COVID-10 pandemic, and on a survey administered to senior university administrators in 101 universities, this paper finds universities innovated in seven ways:
1) Research and analysis to support decision makers in formulating strategies of educational continuity (outreach).
2) Advancing knowledge based on research in schools in the context of the Pandemic (research).
3) Instructional and technological resources and online platforms for students and teachers, including efforts to support connectivity (outreach).
4) Professional development to teachers, education administrators and parents (outreach).
5) Highlighting the importance of attention to socio-emotional support to students (outreach).
6) Organizational learning and innovation (synergies among research, teaching and outreach).
7) Innovations in teaching: Engaging university students in these collaborations with schools (teaching).
These seven innovative engagements with schools to sustain educational opportunity include products, solutions, processes and managerial improvements and for the most part they are evolutionary innovations and in some cases revolutionary.
Products
Research and analysis to support decision makers in formulating strategies of educational continuity
Advancing knowledge based on research in schools in the context of the Pandemic.
Highlighting the importance of attention to socio-emotional support to students (outreach).
Solutions
Instructional and technological resources and online platforms for students and teachers, including efforts to support connectivity.
Processes
Professional development to teachers, education administrators and parents.
Innovations in teaching: Engaging university students in these collaborations with schools.
Managerial improvement
Organizational learning and innovation (synergies among research, teaching and outreach).
These collaborations were facilitated by and in turn reinforced three institutional processes supportive of outreach:
1) University mission and strategy
2) Collaboration and institutional integration
3) Structures and preexisting collaborations with schools
These collaborations fed back in particular into the research function of the university, redirecting existing or novel research efforts towards themes made salient by the pandemic: the importance of learning a breath of skills, the importance of attending to school inequality or to the role of digital learning. There was some feedback from this community outreach into the teaching function of the university, but this appears to have been more modest.
The collaborations universities developed with schools during the pandemic did influence views on what students should learn in schools, emphasizing in particular the importance of emotional well-being, but did not seem to have had broader impact in influencing the agenda of what competencies and skills students should learn in school, a timely topic on the agenda of a number of governments. In most cases, these collaborations also appear to not have influenced views on what university students should learn.
The collaborations created multiple learning opportunities for the faculty and staff directly involved in them, causing some faculty to reorient their research interests or develop new ones as a result of the strengthened communications with schools.
The collaborations depended on and reinforced collaboration and team learning and a culture of experimentation and innovation, and new forms of rapid exchange of information resulting from intra and inter institutional collaboration.

Author

• Fernando M. Reimers, Harvard University