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Revelations of Emergency Education
Words are important. Terms, even more so. Over the past month, I’ve heard our current state of education referred to by many different monikers — online education, distance learning, remote content delivery. Folks have been quick to point out that what we have transitioned into is not e-Learning. Cool, I won’t call it that, although I am not versed enough to distinguish where exactly the molehill becomes the mountain on that one. What I do know is that we are unfortunately compelled to roll out our own forms of e-Learning. And under these circumstances, we can forget about parading around different tropes that make it sound like we know what we’re doing, because we don’t. What we are experiencing deserves to be named appropriately. It is e-Learning alright, more appropriately — Emergency Education.
The only benefit to this crisis in education created by the coronavirus pandemic is that it allows us all the opportunity to catch up on what we should have done before. The institution of education is not outside of this humbling reality. All of us were running too fast and we see the remnants of it. Ironically, it seems as though we haven’t learned our lesson as of yet. In education, we are still sprinting! While most schools began indefinitely suspending traditional school by announcing a transition to complete virtual learning, they forgot to acknowledge that while many a teacher are…
