Teaching Social Justice and Engaging Gen Z Students in Digital Classrooms During COVID-19 

Abstract

The outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 disrupted the lives of people on all fronts, but especially the traditional education system. Now dependent on online learning during a global pandemic, political unrest, and a contentious presidential election, many school educators were forced to transition to virtual instruction amid the ongoing health crises posed by COVID-19 and the ever-present issue of racism. We gathered and analyzed the teaching experiences of instructors at an historically Black college or university as they addressed social justice issues during the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of college-age students today are from Generation Z (Gen Z), the “digital native” generation. They are living in a time in which recent social justice movements have called them to the frontlines. To teach Gen-Z students, faculty should create courses that fit their needs and consider innovative teaching strategies to engage them in classrooms. We discuss three classroom activities that showcase instructors’ pedagogical efforts during such unprecedented times.

Predictors of Student Apathy amongst Generation Z

“…The social interests of Gen Z comprise social media, social entrepreneurship, pop culture, and social networking (Goldring & Azab, 2021;Haddouche & Salomone, 2018). These interests describe their affinity to digitised processes (Jacobsen & Barnes, 2020;Sun, 2021). As a result, educating them has been deemed a significant challenge for the predominantly traditionally and analogically-rooted stream of educators who lack the digitised privileges afforded to Generation Zs (Nissi et al, 2020;Njenga, 2018;Ntshwarang et al, 2021;Yakubu & Dasuki, 2018).…”

“…Consistently, the growing scale of Generation Z demography within the tertiary education community has overstretched predominant traditional methods in the developing world and has ushered in a critical need for a reengineering process. In agreement, Sun et al (2021) and Szymkowiak et al (2021) averred that teaching and management of Generation Zs demand methods that differ from those experienced by other age groups. Putting it into perspective, the inimitability of Generation Z about their predecessors infers that educators need new-age pedagogical interventions to cater to this group of learners (Saxena & Mishra, 2021;Zorn, 2017).…”

Pedagogy on the Fly

“…Moreover, students were suffering from emotional needs that required extra consideration (Kaplan-Rakowski, 2021). These factors were only compounded by the societal changes underway at this time (Bridges, 2021), particularly in issues related to social justice and racism (Powell, et al, 2021). In other words, even though the pandemic was a worldwide event with significant implications, it did not occur in a vacuum; many other stressors occurred simultaneously which contributed not only to the society-wide problems, but also the possibility of enormous change within education: "Education in its various forms is always an outgrowth of struggle…This urgency demands that educators develop a new language, vision, and politics to address the current challenges faced by educators and the wider society" (Giroux, 2021, p. 9).…”