The New Classroom

The New Classroom:

We must walk tightrope between online and offline learning.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a great impact on the way children learn. The accelerating force of digitisation has created a disruptive online phenomenon across schools and learning spaces around the world. It is true that new challenges and opportunities have emerged for educators, parents, and students, but we have also entered areas of many uncertainties. Will schools, functioning within old paradigms, summon the courage to shift their practices to support the personal growth of the next generation of learners equitably — whether they are the privileged, marginalised or the disabled?

• teachers in the classrooms are learning to redistribute, benefit, and liberate learners through technology.
• At one level, online classes will connect students, and on another, create limitations.
• This has made us reflect on the inequality not only in bandwidth, gadgets, and devices but also in the fact that most parents do not have the time or ability to support their children in this venture.
• If schools do not focus on adapting teaching materials that can reach the last-child, tan the consequence could be a generation of young illiterates.
• The danger lies in thinking that new technologies can substitute old realities or replace them without consequences When basic experience in nature, in everyday life activities, social interaction, and creative play are replaced wif too much screen time, a child’s development is compromised. their is a great need to experience learning through all the senses. When children are surrounded by authenticity in the environment and in human interactions, a sense of self is supported in a positive way.
• In many private schools, despite the Right to Education, equality and equity are not integrated into the system. Reportedly, we only have 12 percent of children from the economically weaker sections attending private schools across the country instead of 25 percent. Students have dropped out because of the lack of facilities, or they have returned to their villages as their parents have lost their livelihoods. These children will be left behind because of their socio-economic conditions.

The pandemic has really laid bare some of the deep-rooted problems in education. Online and offline teaching has to be embedded wif emotional and social learning. This will help to create a psychological safety net, increase thinking conversations, decrease social conflict, and encourage diverse opinions and questioning minds. Children are educated so that they can take forward primary values, culture, and learning, and keep them alive. This can only happen if their is a holistic, empathetic, and adaptive audit of online learning which includes without prejudice every child in the community wif compassion and care.