Does Distance Learning Work for All Age Groups?
Online classes, Zoom discussion, video conferencing homework reviews. All resourceful and somewhat effective attempts made by dedicated educators to adapt to our current crisis. I would make the argument that they have been able to satisfy the most obvious holes left by a quarantined school year. Some have even ventured as far as saying that online schooling is a viable and flexible replacement for in-person learning. I would disagree. There is a feeling, a sensation of loss when a product or a service goes digital for good. It has been hanging around our society for the past few decades through the development of everything from live-streamed concerts to the slow degradation of in-person communication. Something is lost when we transform physical reality into compacted bytes of data. We are now experiencing on a grand scale the importance of the physicality and physical presence of educators. While I hypothesize that this is at least somewhat important on all levels. I will mostly focus on young children for the purpose of this piece.
Enter any kindergarten or 1st-grade class and you will see children moving from table to table, picking up and dropping educational tools and toys, and doing what might send a COVID-era public health official into a state of hyperventilation — touching everything in sight. Young children seem to treat their hands as an extension of their eyes. The classroom is a physical world for them and everything from picking up a building block to eating it is fair game. How then can a child, still learning to experience the world through concrete physical stimuli, hope to transition to the world of digital learning?
Research shows us that virtual tools can not fully replace the physical manipulation of the kindergarten classroom. A study specifically conducted on kindergarten students found that students who had an incorrect understanding of a beam balance and the scientific concept of the comparative mass of objects were less likely to correctly understand the concept if learning virtually than a student who was able to physically manipulate the balance. It should be noted that for students who already had a correct understanding of the tested concept, there was no difference in the understanding of the virtual vs. physical manipulation test groups. Still, there is important data worth noting here. Research has shown that there isn’t much of a difference when similar tests are carried out in test groups in fourth grade or beyond. The inference could thus be made that early childhood is a formative time for children to use physical spaces and manipulations to understand the world around them.
There lies something integral in the physical world of our kindergarten years. Sitting in classrooms surrounded by tools of learning, many of which disadvantaged students may not be able to replace at home, there is a creative and academic world that is literally being built around the child. In a fundamentally formative time, these children are given hours a day to explore their minds and delve into their curiosities in a space surrounded by others just like them. Physical spaces hold special places in our memory and emotional development. Years after we have forgotten names and faces, we can still remember the classrooms we learned in or the feel of our childhood homes. Especially for disadvantaged or marginalized students coming from unstable or at-risk environments, the physical space of the classroom can be an integral foundation on which their basic academics to be built. Building these memories in emotionally stable and positive foundations could attach positive emotional connotations to education that could inspire lifelong passion and even potentially foster greater recallability. It is in these rooms that many children start to form a full sense of self by experiencing others. It is in these early years that children learn not just their fundamental math and English skills, but why it isn’t nice to steal a toy or hit another child. These spaces matter and their implications should be carefully considered in this time away.
Finally the teacher. A great teacher brings so much more to the classroom than just the knowledge of the subject. They are able to use physical cues and subtle gestures to encourage students when they’re feeling unsure. They are able to read a student’s body language and know if a student has a question even if they don’t want to admit it in front of their friends. We are social creatures, and as such we read and hear meaning beyond the first layer of verbal communication. I am surely not the first to suggest that we simply don’t connect with others digitally as well as we do in person. Preeminent digital theorist Douglas Rushkoff notes how humans build rapport with each other by the almost imperceptible synching of breathing rates and that we build trust by looking into each other’s eyes. Digital connection simply cannot cut it when it comes to our social behaviors and could even be socially detrimental for children who are at the peak of developing their prosocial behaviors and understanding human connection. Nonverbal communication plays a huge role in the way we understand each other, and it is no accident that a smile puts us more at ease than someone simply saying that they are ok.
When things open up in the U.S. and around the world, there will be people who will urge policymakers to stay fully virtual. They will note the cost-effectiveness and cite data that correctly supports the benefits of digitized education in a blended learning environment. But we should be wary of taking our digital revolution a step too far. Digital learning is a tool in the fight for better learning but it may not be the golden key we’re looking for. Students need space, physical space, to grow and learn. They need to see the light in a teacher’s eyes when they answer a question correctly and feel the camaraderie of solving a problem with a classmate. As technology advances, there may be a day in which the virtual world faces no lag behind the physical, but not yet. For now, we must know the limits and the possibilities of the tools at our disposal.
