K-12 During the Pandemic: Midterm Assignment
Due October 25 by 6 pm EST
Project goals
What does the COVID-19 pandemic mean for elementary, middle, and high school education right now? The goal of this project is to deploy your budding sociological perspective to think about this issue.
What to do to work on the project
- Read and listen these things and take notes:
- The Public Purposes of Schooling in the Age of Coronavirus
- Office Hours podcast episode on the racial equity implications of reopening schools during this pandemic, featuring Tyrone Howard, Pedro Noguera, Jaleel Howard, and Walter Allen. Available on Apple https://t.co/gBMfspjwej or Spotify: https://t.co/vayl971u3o
- Nice White Parents podcast from the New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/podcasts/nice-white-parents-serial.html
- SSRC’s The Shift, on education, featuring Caitlin Zaloom, Pedro Noguera and moderated by L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy
2. Connect with kids, parents, and teachers — at least 1 of each, and ideally more — and interview them. They can be people in your life, or if you want to speak with someone you don’t know, check out the spreadsheet of volunteers linked in the #projects channel on Slack. Start doing this no later than September 10 so that you aren’t in a rush at the end of the project. Remember that we are holding an Optional Synchronous Session about this project on Friday September 4 from 11am-12 pm. We will share ideas for how to connect with students, parents, and teachers, and answer questions. For info on how to access this session on Zoom, go to our class Slack channel and look under #zooms . Can’t make it? We will record this session and post a link in Slack on the #projects channel.
Take notes on what the people you talk to say, since that will become data for your paper. Here are some examples of questions you might ask: (1) What is school like right now? How included/excluded do you feel in how school is going? Why? (2) How has the pandemic affected school for you? How has it affected your family? (3) What stresses and stressed behaviors have you felt or exhibited while going to school (or teaching school, or helping your kid go to school) during the pandemic?(4) What has helped you with going to school (or teaching school, or helping your kid go to school) during the pandemic?
Resources to help you!
Take a look at the Class Schedule. You’ll find an optional session on September 4 to discuss the project, and an optional session on September 14th to push your thinking on the project with a chat engaging Nicole Lynn Lewis.
Writing up the project paper
- Start a Medium blog that will serve as your project paper. Remember you can begin it and leave it unpublished as you work on it. Be sure to tag it #TempleSocEd and use the word “Midterm” in the title.
- Consider the overarching question:What does the COVID-19 pandemic mean for elementary, middle, and high school education right now? Then consider these more specific questions: What have been the opportunities and challenges created by the pandemic, how does that affect what students are doing and learning in school/ how teachers are teaching/ how parents are supporting their kids? What inequalities in schooling do you see evidenced during this pandemic? What is making them better? What is making them worse?
- Craft a response (suggested length of 1000 words, minimum 750 words) that draws on the data you’ve assembled from the activities above. Everything you did- from your own notes on the things you listened to to the notes you took on the interviews you conducted- all of this constitutes your data. Be prepared to document how you collected it.
- You might start by outlining your answer- you might want to begin by offering your conclusion, and then talking about how you reached it. Be sure to describe your data and methods — who did you speak with (and how), what did you read and listen to, etc. Then reflect on what you learned, and whenever possible relate your lessons to the readings you did for this project and for the class more broadly.
- Post your blog on Medium no later than 6 pm EST on October 25. Be sure to tag it #TempleSocEd and use the word “Midterm” in the title. Post it to our class publication and link to it on the Slack #Medium channel
