草莓社区

The Charge

Ensure students, families, and educators have equitable access to key levers for student learning and engagement, including technological and multilingual resources.

Research Findings:

• Pandemic-era teaching and learning made evident both strengths and weaknesses in the educational system.
  • The strengths centered on the people – the educators and families who came together in a pinch to enact distance learning. But systemic weaknesses hampered these efforts, specifically the lacking infrastructures for accessible technology and bilingual communication.
• Following the rapid shift to distance learning, educators realized that some students and families lacked access to the technology needed to engage in online learning.
  • Even in districts with one-to-one technology, stakeholders realized that (a) this initiative did not include young learners in early-childhood settings and (b) students needed the internet to use these devices to engage in distance learning.
• Educators also quickly realized the challenges of communicating with families who spoke languages other than English at home.
  • Whereas multilingual communication was typically disseminated at the school level, teachers needed to engage parents in real-time, requiring more dynamic and on-demand access to translation software and services that were not available to them.
• While widespread distance learning is hopefully a thing of the past, these issues can be rectified to enhance access for all students and families.

Potential Action Steps:

• Ensure every student has access to laptop or tablet to engage in learning.
• Ensure every family has access to wireless internet to use these devices at home
• Ensure every teacher has access to translation services to facilitate home-school communication with speakers of all languages.