The nation’s teachers have spent their Easter "holidays" shifting their units of work online. And now, the Prime Minister pleads, think of the children.
The term of a million weeks finally came to an end and our teachers breathed a collective sigh of relief. Two weeks to take stock and, as the metaphor goes, stop changing the tyre while the truck is hurtling down the highway.
Then the Prime Minister pleads with them to return to the classroom, emphasising after the national cabinet meeting on Thursday that classrooms are the best places for children to learn.
This follows his comments on Wednesday, when teachers busy trying to prepare for remote learning might have paused to catch sight of the Prime Minister calling on them to walk back through the school gates, telling them that “the education of our children hangs in the balance”.
He doesn’t want children “giving up a whole year of their learning”.
Teachers were mystified by this. To begin with, the idea that classroom teachers — or even most school leaders — have any say over whether schools are open or "closed" is absurd. Those decisions are taken at a system level, guided by state and territory governments.
On Thursday, after the national cabinet meeting, the Prime Minister’s office unveiled a list of seven national principles for the educational response to the COVID-19 crisis. The first was reiterating his point that learning is best achieved in a physical classroom.
But he then conceded what the education community knows already — that schools will be allowed to continue with remote flexible learning.
It’s hard to fathom that at the very point in time when teachers are collectively working harder than they ever have before, that they should be accused of somehow letting the side down. A reminder that teachers already set a high bar — it’s a mighty difficult job at the best of times — in the interests of their students.
Right now, we must have national conversation about what schooling and learning are — and what they are not. The new principles are a departure point but they don’t get to the essence of either.
Let’s start with the conversation about "home schooling". What is happening now is not home schooling. In home schooling, parents design learning for their kids. They map learning activities to the curriculum. They assess learning.
On the basis of this assessment, they make decisions about what needs to happen next. An integral part of home schooling is usually an array of social and community activities, from Girl Guides to gallery visits to the local football club, none of which is available right now.
If children are learning at home, following a course of study painstakingly designed by their teachers, with whom they have regular contact via a variety of means, they are not being “home schooled”. To call what’s happening in this situation “home schooling” undermines the extraordinary work of our teachers, who are engaged in the Herculean effort of rethinking every aspect of their practice with an eye to maintaining the quality of teaching and learning.
Not to mention that it puts ridiculous and unnecessary pressure on parents, most of whom are neither teachers nor home schoolers. So let’s call it "schooling from home".
Neither are teachers who have spent untold time and effort rethinking and reshaping their lessons for students to engage with at home shirking their responsibility to teach.
The Prime Minister had it wrong when he said on Wednesday “I kept my kids in school up until the last week because they weren't getting taught at school in that last week, I mean, they were sitting in a room looking at a screen; that's not teaching, that's childminding”.
The teachers at Mr Morrison’s daughters’ school were surprised surely to hear that they spent the final week of term one babysitting. That’s not what online teaching feels like to anyone.
The job of the teacher, in a nutshell, is to create the conditions for student learning. It’s not to stand in front of the class and "deliver" the curriculum or to magically transmit knowledge from one brain to another. Yes, being co-located with your students helps, because an important part of being able to create the conditions for learning is really knowing your students, being able to read the room, but it’s simply not the case that teaching, much less learning, happens only in the classroom.
When teachers are pedalling as fast as they can to create good conditions for their students’ learning without having access to their physical classrooms — and I know from my serial lurking on teachers’ social media groups that they are — it doesn’t follow that we’re looking down the barrel of students “giving up a whole year of their learning”.
Yes, there is a problem with equity of access only not all students have adequate equipment for schooling at home, including internet access. And, of course, some students need to be at school because their parents need to be at work, or for welfare-related reasons.
Nobody, however, is suggesting that those children be denied access to school, and indeed teachers and school leaders are working hard to make sure they aren’t. Some acknowledgement of those efforts is necessary.
Schools are workplaces for students, teachers and other adults. In most schools, neither classrooms nor staff-rooms are spacious — your average office worker’s cubicle set-up looks like salubrious accommodation compared to most school staff-rooms. Morrison was right when he pointed out the staffroom could be a risky place for teachers to be.
At a time when social distancing orders prevent us from moving around freely or catching up for dinner with a couple of friends, it makes no sense for teachers and students to be sent back to the confines of the classroom or the staffroom.
Social distancing measures put in place for workers in other essential services are simply not able to be rolled out in schools full of students and teachers — there’s literally not enough space. It might be a safe enough environment for students because of their age (I don’t dispute the public health experts on this) but if it’s not safe for lawyers or waitstaff or academics or parliamentarians to be in their workplaces right now, it’s not safe for teachers and their families either.
Nicole Mockler is an associate professor of education at the University of Sydney
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