Reimagining the Possible: A Positive Frame for Education Planning in the COVID Age

Frank D. Grossman & Cheryl Jones-Walker / September 2021

The disruption to schooling wrought by the pandemic in the past year-and-a-half has been distressing. It has, however, provided educational leaders a valuable opportunity to reimagine the schooling experiences of Black and Brown children and their families. Educators need not perpetuate a system that often produces and replicates racial trauma. Our children have lived through a life-altering time. From this disruption we can create an educational reality that engages students in new ways, resulting in deeply meaningful learning and opportunities.

This reinvention must begin within a positive framework, focusing on strengths, lived experiences, curiosity, and passions. We can educate in a manner that allows children to unlock the truth in themselves and within their communities. Let’s teach our children to be radical linguists, critical anthropologists, economists, demographers, epidemiologists, journalists and doctors. The possibilities borne out of a devastating pandemic could be exactly the restart educators need to create classrooms that encourage imagination, awareness, and critical inquiry with the objective of transforming our world.

District and school leaders need to empower and support teachers to develop learning opportunities for children that take stock of the incredible resilience demonstrated by students and their families. Educators can build on the strength shown by children, their families, and communities — experiences that capture all the joy, pain, wisdom, and complexity of human experience.

Educators must move beyond the “learning-loss” conversation provoked by the cancellation of full-time, in-person schooling for more than a year. While it may be well-intentioned, this focus on loss of education only reinforces the deficit mentality that pervades our public education system — the belief that Black and Brown kids need to be fixed or made whole by schooling. This does not mean to ignore the devastation of the past year. We need to acknowledge the disproportionate adverse impact that COVID-19 has had on Black and Brown communities, both in the number of deaths and the economic toll. But we don’t have to focus on the negative, telling kids and families how far behind they are on our historic artificial metrics that reinforce a perceived deficit.

To move forward, teachers must engage students in meaningful and authentic assignments while attending to their emotional well-being. Kids could document what is occurring around them by conducting oral histories of their neighbors and family, near and far. They could examine why the burden of the pandemic is falling so heavily on their communities. Students can use the virus as the start of an investigation of microbiology. Assignments must help kids and families acknowledge the incredible resilience they have demonstrated this year. While we support students, families, and teachers as they grieve, we can also celebrate as we create opportunity for them to imagine and create a racially equitable world.