Professional Reading #2: Impact of Covid on Māori and Pacific learners

In my last blogpost on a research paper, it was clear that the impact of covid created a disconnect for learners from people and place.  As the majority of my students are Māori and Pasifika, I wanted to deep dive into specific impacts to them as learners at home.  I found two pieces of research that link to knowing my learners and the barriers of student learning.

Report ONE

The first report is School led learning at home: Voices of Maori and Pasifika students report:  Experiences of parents of Māori and Pasifika students in the 2020 COVID19 Alert Level 4 lockdown.  This paper reports on a survey that sought the views of parents of Māori and Pasifika students on their experiences of the first week of school-led learning at home. 134 parents responded to the survey.  In the survey, parents were asked about the benefits and challenges they had experienced, and also to provide suggestions for improving school-led learning at home. There were 100 responses by parents of Māori learners detailing their concerns about school-led learning at home during week 1 of term 2, 2020.  

“A significant number of parents were concerned that school-led learning at home did not provide the opportunity for social interaction between children. This lack of connection was identified as having a negative impact on the āhua and wairua of the children. This concern was contributed to by a lack of support from peers when students were undertaking work online.  Parents noted that they did not receive the usual support and assurance they would have received if working in groups or alongside their peers:  Not able to socialise with other children outside the whānau, my children learn from social interaction too and it's great for their mental health and they don't have peers for motivation (pg 20). 

Connecting with peers, whanau and friends is an important aspect for students and parents in ensuring the well-being of everyone is taken care of.

Report TWO

A recent report released by ERO suggested Pacific students' education hit harder by pandemic, but schools addressing issue - ERO (RNZ article 12th May).

After reading the RNZ article, I wanted to read the report discussed on the Impact of Covid on Pacific learners in more detail to see if I could find links to support my hypothesis. 

“Pacific learners largely preferred face-to-face learning.  For many Pacific learners, online learning had not been as successful as face-to-face learning. Learning online lacked the connectedness of being in front of a teacher with their friends. We also heard that Pacific learners missed the practical approach to learning usually achieved when physically at school. They also missed the ability to get feedback as communicating with teachers wasn’t as easy outside of the classroom (pg 24) 

I enjoyed reading this report as it did not just identify barriers that were common with our Māori learners but also offered solutions to show what people/groups/schools did to support their learners.  At school, students and staff have shared the same sentiments and how coming back to school was an adjustment and this has been seen in the disengagement and disconnectedness of our kids on their learning.