Photo source: Pexels

Social distancing. Stay at home. Lockdown. These are phrases that will be forever synonymous with the year 2020 – the year of the virus. And what about resilience?

We are only a third of the way through this terrible year, and there will be more pain to come. But we are a resilient people. Humanity doesn’t just lay down and submit. We fight back. When we are going through Hell, we keep going. And that’s a tribute not only to essential front-line staff such as health professionals, utility workers and emergency personnel. It’s also a shout out to the teachers, the school staff, nursery workers and others who look after and educate our young people, week in, week out, whatever else is going on in the world.

For education people, learning doesn’t stop even though all around, social life, commerce, business, mortgage payments, air travel and other common practices have ground to a halt. No, learning continues, and so does the need to provide great educational environments within which children can continue to develop their knowledge and skills. Schools all over the world have remained open (even though they are officially ‘closed’), to provide care and support for the children of essential workers, and also to continue to offer students everywhere remote learning opportunities. Some of the stories of how teachers have achieved and sustained this are herculean, and others will emerge when the dust finally settles.  The pandemic has compelled educators to teach at a distance in many instances, and the scramble to find solutions has been frenetic. But some have been doing this for many years, have a lot of experience in distance education, and can point to standard tools that will enable this to be done effectively. We have become a technology mediated society and education is at the forefront of the efforts to connect and continue.

I wrote a post called Pandemic Pedagogy about some of the first resources that had been created during the early days of the pandemic. They are mainly high quality, focused and sought after resources, but there is still (and never will be) a substitute for empathetic, knowledgeable teaching input. And so teachers have been sat in front of their laptops teaching via Zoom, Skype, Teams and Hangouts, and a whole host of other video link tools. It’s not easy. In fact, in some instances, it’s almost impossible to engage every student, everywhere, at the same time. A bit like a traditional classroom really. But more so. Teachers have begun to discover that behaviour management issues are magnified when you’re at a distance from your students. Communication challenges are amplified when all you are relying on is your home wifi bandwidth and a 3 year old laptop.

But survive we will, and in years to some we’ll look back on the ‘year of the virus’, and say – yes, it was a terrible time, but we got through it, and now we know a lot more about ourselves and our limitations, we have learnt to be more resilient, and we can get through anything. I salute educators everywhere. Technology will not replace you. You will always be needed.

Lockdown learning by Steve Wheeler was written in Plymouth, England and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.