RAPID: Pandemic School Closures and Teacher-Student Relationships

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This project assesses how new efforts and strategies for action, developed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, challenge or compound pre-existing differences among students. Existing scholarship predicts that during crises, people and organizations develop new strategies for action. As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, more than half of America’s schools have closed down and transitioned to online learning. This constitutes a unique natural experiment in how a crisis and uncertainty can affect teacher-student relationships (TSRs) and how these in turn can affect differences. The current crisis may strengthen TSRs as teachers and schools reach out to students in novel ways and normally non-academic matters such as student’s health and access to the internet at home become priorities. This study will help policymakers and school officials understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting school closures on different groups of students, informing efforts to redress the effects of this crisis and plan for future disasters.This project expands upon six months of ethnographic observations in two Virginia high schools (conducted prior to school closures) with online observations, interviews and weekly student time diaries and photojournals during the spring and summer of 2020, as well as resumed in-person data collection during fall 2020. Broadly, this project advances knowledge by showing 1) how school and teacher strategies to reach students during this crisis are received; 2) how TSRs change during moments of crisis and 3) how these changes inform differences in student experiences and outcomes. Specific research questions include: (1) How do TSRs shape the impact of the crisis on student engagement and outcomes? (2) How does the ongoing impact of TSRs vary by student background? (3) How does school response to the crisis affect teachers’ connections with students? and (4) How does the impact of this response vary based on student background? To address these questions, this study’s data collection includes eight months of observations (both virtual and in-person when schools re-open), collection of weekly student time diaries and photojournals (N=80), and in-depth semi-structured interviews with administrators (N=20), students (N=120) and teachers (N=60).This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.