Family learning and working in lockdown: Navigating crippling fear and euphoric joy to support children’s literacy

Abstract

This paper offers a nuanced perspective of two families’ lockdown literacy journies with their young children during the COVID 19 pandemic. We present informal home learning examples stimulated by play and by school-sanctioned synchronous and asynchronous activities from homes geographically miles apart yet close in terms of shared experience. In response to the catch-up and learning loss narrative which threatens to overshadow some of the positive learning experiences taking place at home, we redirect the ‘catch-up’ narrative towards a nuanced understanding of family learning at home by articulating the complexity of circumstance. Methodologically, drawing on Autoethnography, we present vignettes of lockdown life from Scotland and Michigan, USA. Throughout this paper we articulate challenges with the catch-up narrative and root our conclusions in the early childhood philosophy that learning extends beyond the mind to a whole body, holistic experience.

Children’s Voices on the COVID-19 Pandemic as Presented in Swedish Junior and Daily Newspapers

“…The results indicate that the published newspaper articles testify how pandemic management strategies disrupted children's everyday lives in multiple ways, including the disruption of schooling and social activities and involuntary isolation from friends and family. While these disruptions were not necessarily detrimental for all children, as it appears from the included newspaper articles and as also shown in research (e.g., Arnott & Teichert, 2023;Burke et al, 2023;Pahl et al, 2023), other children were seemingly distressed and negatively affected by the situation, especially when already faced with vulnerabilities due to poverty, additional health threats, and/or crowded homes. Previous studies also highlight the enhanced exposure of and negative consequences for deprived populations in facing the pandemic, pointing to and amplifying social disparity (Bajos et al, 2021;Sanrey et al, 2021).…”

“…Studies argue that mainstream, normative discourses on children's circumstances during the pandemic and their handling thereof ought to be nuanced and illuminate all their complexities. This implies that one should not take discourses on, for example, children's "learning loss" for granted as the sole construction of, for example, children's education and childhood literacies (Arnott & Teichert, 2023;Gourlay, 2021;Pahl et al, 2023;Reimer et al, 2021). Several studies also present creative and resourceful narratives related to children's learning (Pahl et al, 2023;Yoon, 2023), thereby nuancing dominant discourses.…”