Episode 034: Sarah Barrett

Dr. Sarah Barrett, of the Faculty of Education at York University, studies the impact that the core beliefs and values of teachers have on classroom practice. She talks here about the emotional experience of online learning and how this has affected teachers and students during the pandemic.

Transcript

Cameron: My guest today is Associate Professor Sarah Barrett of the Faculty of Education at York University. Dr. Barrett's research centers on the impact that the core beliefs and values of teachers have on classroom practice. She's authored several articles on teachers experiences and teacher identity. I spoke to her about her current research, which revolves around teachers' experiences of what it's been like to teach online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many listeners to Podcast or Perish are teachers and professors themselves, so I think this topic might just resonate with our audience. I hope you enjoy our conversation.... All right. Well, then, Sarah, welcome to the podcast.

Sarah: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Cameron: The article I want to talk about that you wrote recently is called "Maintaining Equitable and Inclusive Classroom Communities Online During the COVID-19 Pandemic." It was published this year in the Journal of Teaching and Learning. It's a topic that I think will resonate with many of the listeners to this podcast, because many of us are teachers in one capacity or another. But let me start by asking you the initial question, what do you mean by the phrase "classroom community"?

Sarah: Well, classroom community, what it boils down to is the sum total of the interactions and relationships within a classroom. So between the students, between the teacher and the students, and a little bit of the outside community's influence on it. And so a classroom community is greater than the sum of its parts. It always exists, but some classroom communities are more conducive to learning than others.

Cameron: What makes for a conducive experience? When you're talking about the community, what has to happen in the classroom community to make it a good learning experience for the students?

Sarah: I would say so broadly speaking, it has to feel from the student's point of view and from the teacher's point of view that they have a shared purpose for why they're there together. There needs to be some trust. So students feel like they can take risks with each other and with their own intellectual development and emotional development. There also should be a sense of belonging, they should feel like this is our class, that's also really important. And finally, and this seems obvious, but it is actually really important when it comes to online, and that is having really high quality interactions that there's a possibility of some depth to the interaction and possibility for people to grow through the interactions with each other.

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative) The kind of model that you're looking at here, it draws on a number of different scholars. I noticed that you mentioned bell hooks, who talks about civic self-awareness and agency. This is a very active model of learning. This is not students sitting there as they often expect to do in my accounting class. They come into the class expecting to simply take notes and I'm going to tell them how accounting is done and then I'll test them on it later. I try my best to disabuse them of that early on. You're talking about a different age group, I think, where there's still that need for the students to be engaged in producing their own learning experience.

Sarah: Yeah. And the thing that I love about bell hook's approach to pedagogy is that it is so dynamic because you could say, "Well, what we need in the classroom is that it's really harmonious and peaceful," but that's not what she's describing. She's describing this ruckus, "Let's challenge each other, but trust each other well enough to know that we're all working towards the same thing." So I always see it as, she really focuses on love and respect and trust, which is very holistic. It's not all just about skills and knowledge, it's also about the emotional aspects, like she says, there's nothing wrong with emotion, as long as you acknowledge it and bring it in. And that is part of a supportive community. So that's part of the reason why I really love using her ideas as basis for what I would consider the ideal for the classroom community.

Cameron: The roles of emotion in the classroom have been so prominent and so profound during the pandemic as we've tried to help the students through the process, but also understand our own role as instructors and teachers and what we're going through. It's just been an enormous experience.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. And paradoxically, I think part of the anguish that the teachers that I interview and heard from through the surveys was that the emotional aspect became quite flat for them, they didn't have access to what the students were going through. They knew they were having trouble, but they said it was like teaching through a wall. So that lack of interaction, the lack of depth was very difficult because, of course, in the classroom you have that entrainment, you have the emotions between everybody and amongst everyone. And that's a big part of teaching.

Cameron: We talked about the idea that community isn't just a natural state of affairs in the classroom, it actually has to be built. Can you describe that concept in the regular classroom pre-pandemic? What were teachers doing to create community?

Sarah: Yeah. I think that what most teachers were doing, and I would say this is across the board K to 12, is they would always try to create a space where everybody knows what you're trying to do. So, ostensibly, you begin with, well, this is what the course is about, which seems like it's just a description of facts, but it's also the teacher sussing out what the students are like. As a teacher educator, I always tell my students, no matter what grade you're teaching, spend a week getting your students to get to know each other and you, and it saves you so much trouble later, because you're going to be together and you have to work together. And that community, community happens anyway, but a community that's conducive to learning, that actually does take, it takes some real effort on the teacher's part and they have to be skillful about it. And I think every teacher who's taught for any amount of time, and I'm sure you've had this as well, has had a class where that didn't happen. Where you're like, okay, I'm not enjoying this. How do I fix this? And you never quite work it out. And you always remember that class. You don't want it ever again. Right? Because it is something that we all know. We know we have to create a community that has purpose to it, that has that belonging, that has the students working together. And when that doesn't happen, we know the learning isn't optimal.

Cameron: So this model for a sense of community, sense of belonging, trust, shared purpose, and high quality interactions, how do you begin to take that kind of a theorization and look at this abrupt transition from the in-person K-12 experience to this online experience, what do you do in terms of your research approach to get at what's happening?

Sarah: Right. And I should say that when I did the research, I did not start with theory because I never do. I always start with the experience of the participants. And so as we, we talked about this a bit just beforehand, just that when this happened, when there was this shift from in-person to online, I thought, now I have to study this, because I have to know what did the experience, what was it like going from one to the other? And I did not have a theory in mind. Now, bell hooks I've been reading for years, and so that was in the back of my mind, but it wasn't the theory that I was looking for, it was, I want to understand what are they going through? And because I do so much research on professional identity, I made assumptions about the sort of data I was going to get, which you have to do. You have to do that to start to design your surveys and your instruments. But I was, of course, surprised by what I found, because their professional identity was not wrapped up in the lack of skill that they suddenly experienced going from one medium to another, but more involved in the lack of community that they experienced when they were no longer able to access their students physically. So I would say that, that theory of community, the Rovai, came in afterward -- after I'd done these surveys, after I'd done the interviews, and I was looking for a way to explain and articulate what the students and the teachers were experiencing.

Cameron: So if you're trying to articulate what you're are observing, you have to be able to observe it. What decisions do you go through in terms of getting the data? I can think of so many different ways of learning what teachers are going through. You could do surveys, you could do interviews, you could do classroom visits, although they're not in the classroom, but you know what I mean. There's all kinds of different ways. How do you decide what to do to go learn what's going on?

Sarah: I usually, I always prefer -- my favorite -- is classroom observations followed by interviews and debrief, but, of course, that wasn't available, couldn't do classroom visits. And so I knew I wanted to do interviews, but I also need that interview to be somehow in context. And so that's when I made the decision to do the surveys and I have done this method before. In designing the survey though, because this was (and I hate to use an overused word) an "unprecedented" situation, I decided that, yeah, okay, there's stuff I need to know about what kind of a context they were in, what kind of professional development was available, what their home life was a little bit like, did they have disability? Did they have children? Did they have students that they were worried about? And then all the demographic information, I knew that had to be there in the survey. But I also knew that I didn't necessarily know everything, enough that I can make a really tight survey. So what I did was with every survey question, there was an "other" line. So they would have choices, plus say, if you have any comments, put them here, or if there is some other aspect add it here. And I ended up with a lot of comments from the people who participated in that survey, there were at least 800 people who responded and 760 odd that were completely done and I could use for the data. And so I took that approach of it being open without being so wide open that I wouldn't be able to analyze it. The other reason I did that was because I had no idea how many were going to respond, because the problem is that if you have too small a sample, you may know then you can't do stats on it. And so to make sure that, that wasn't a problem, I also was very narrow about who was allowed to answer the survey. And I said they had to be in Ontario and they had to be a K-12 teacher, who had been teaching in-person and switched to online. And that also helps with the stats later because you have less extraneous variables. So I did that. I did get some pushback, some educational assistance wanted to be part of the survey as well, and some administrators like principals, vice principals, where I said, no, I have to keep it narrow, because again, I didn't know how many were going to respond. And I needed to work with whatever number I got.

Cameron: What was the total population of people who could have responded?

Sarah: Oh, that's a good question. There are thousands of Ontario teachers, but I couldn't tell you the number off hand.

Cameron: So 760 completed responses. How do you know if that's a good response rate?

Sarah: Oh, it's actually excellent. For education, if you have a couple of hundred you're pretty happy. So yeah, it was a good number, because I could do the statistical analysis with just a few hundred and I had 700. So I was like, okay, it was brilliant. It was way more than I was expecting.

Cameron: It sounds like an amazing response. What about, I guess the obvious question for me to ask would be selection bias, self-selection bias. Do you have any ideas about that? Who completes it?

Sarah: Yeah. And, of course, it all depends on the way that you're going about your survey. So I am not a quantitative researcher, I'm a qualitative researcher. So yes, I wanted a large number so that if I was talking to a numbers person, I could justify things. But on the other hand, it didn't matter if they were absolutely typical or not, because they were now the larger population I was going to compare my interviewees to.

Cameron: Oh, okay. Just to help me wrap my head around the kind of data you're looking at, how long was the survey instrument?

Sarah: So it would've taken them maybe 10 or 15 minutes to do it. So there were seven major categories of questions. So they had the typical demographic questions, which would've been at the end. Then there were questions about professional development and support, their students, and how they were seeing their students were perceiving things, their personal lives, their workloads, their interactions with parents and their interactions with their colleagues.

Cameron: How did you go about coming up with those categories? Did you talk to people first of all, to get a rough sense of what mattered to them?

Sarah: Yeah. I think for the most part, it was based on my own experience because I've been studying them for a, well, I guess it's going on 20 years now. So I had an idea of the major categories of questions I should be asking. And I knew that relationships were a big part of what I wanted to look at, because the way I define identity is that it is a more a verb than a noun. It's actually something that comes from your interactions with other people. So, I knew that it was going to be framed in those terms. I also consulted with the company that I did the survey with, because part of the subscription was they would have somebody work with you. So it was good because I could bounce ideas off with them about how things should branch, etc. But, again, I wasn't sure, because it was exploratory and that's why I had so many open questions and there were spots where they could add comments, so that if I had forgotten something, people could comment on those things and I would then have that data.

Cameron: What kinds of things emerged from those extra comments? Were there any new categories of ideas?

Sarah: The biggest thing was assessment, though I knew I was going to do assessment with the interviews because I see that as a process and I didn't feel like I could really learn much from the survey. That was the biggest thing. The other thing was a lot of people were just commenting on how difficult it was being away from their students. And the third thing was just an annoyance with the way things were handled from the Ministry of Education. There were a lot of rants in there, which I expected as well.

Cameron: Yeah. It's understandable. Understandable. Tell me about the interview process then, you boiled it down to about 50 participants. What was your initial approach to the interview? Did you want to have a highly structured interview, or were you just going to go in and have coffee together and chat?

Sarah: And I should say my aim was 50. So I actually contacted 60, as I assumed the 10 wouldn't end up happening. And they were open ended, but semi-structured. So questions were sent ahead to everybody and I, of course, piloted the questions ahead of time with some teachers, just to make sure that I was on the right track with the questions I should be asking. And I focused mostly on process questions. So that most of the questions for the interviews had to do with relationships. It was relationships and assessment and values were the three main topics in the interviews. They were meant to be about an hour, half an hour to an hour long. And the way that things were set up, it's really amazing what you can do online now. In the past I would've had to hire a graduate assistant to do this for me, but now it's all done automatically. Somebody could just go and say, I want to take this slot and they would fill out the ethics form. And then I would just get an email saying, oh, this person's going to be there at this time. So, that was amazing actually. Now I know that if I have a research assistant, they don't have to do that stuff. They can do more analysis and that sort of thing.

Cameron: Your insights from this seem to point in two directions. One is the teachers, implications for teachers, the insights for teachers, but then there's also this profound understanding that the teachers have of what's happening to their students and the differential impacts of the online experience on their students. So, what came out of the interviews for you that really resonated with you or sparked an emotional reaction for you?

Sarah: I think it was the intensity of the connection that teachers have with their students and how it went across from Kindergarten, all the way to Grade 12. They would express it slightly differently, but it always came down to, "I miss being near my students," as not the official "I miss teaching them in person," but "I miss interacting with them in person." So all of them commented on things like, there's none of the spontaneous interactions that we had before: you see the student in a cafeteria and chat with them, you see a student whose body language looks a little slouched, so you go over and talk to them and see what's up. That was huge, missing the body language. We know that body language is a huge part of communication, but we forget how huge it is for education, just knowing what the students need, being able to read the room. That kept coming up, that they couldn't read the room. And so in a lot of ways it felt handcuffed. It was like, "Well, I can't do my job." And that was repeated, that line, "I can't do my job, I feel like I can't do my job," because they couldn't connect with the students who needed the most, who were the ones who weren't showing up. Because you have the option to opt out with online in a way that you can't when you're supposed to be in class at a particular time in person.

Cameron: So just to clarify, you're talking about not being in the session at all and simply going with the asynchronous material?

Sarah: Yeah, or not ever even logging on. So there were, of course, and you've probably heard about this. There were some students that didn't have the means to get online. There were students who were in communities where the entire community didn't have the means to get online, and so they tried paper, delivering paper and that didn't quite work either. There were students who just had really complicated lives and without having to go to school, they just couldn't get it together enough to be online. There are other students, especially the younger ones where their parents couldn't -- because especially a seven year old, they can't go online and sit for three hours without a parent helping them out. So, a lot of students were simply lost. And no matter how hard the teachers and the school tried to get back in contact with them, they couldn't. And so the back end of that academic year was lost for them.

Cameron: How did teachers express the impact of that on them? Not just poorly connecting with their class, but losing students?

Sarah: Yeah. There was a lot of, I think I would describe it as grief. And several teachers said the same thing, and that was, "If they had been in person, I could have gotten to them, I would've gotten them through," but without the initial connection, it simply wasn't possible. So, yeah. There was a lot of grief.

Cameron: Did you get the sense from talking to your participants that there's anything positive coming out of this experience, that's going to improve our learning experiences going forward?

Sarah: Yeah. And I would say that there were, in a few different ways. Some said that there were some students who actually blossomed in this situation because of the lack of distraction for some students. For others, it was just a matter of maybe they were bullied in their class before and now they didn't have to deal with that. And so they did better. There were some students who they just, they were doing really well socially, and that was a distraction. And so now suddenly they could narrowly focus on their schooling. So for some students, though it was a minority, it went really well. And so it was a positive for those students. It was also the case that there were some teachers, they all said the same thing that they learned something, but there was about probably just a few of them who said, I learned so much here. And actually for the students who did show up, we actually did create a nice community, and we all learned a lot together. And so that did happen for some. And then there were other teachers who said things like, well, maybe they didn't learn the content that well, but they learned something about the world. They learned something about resilience. They learned about how to motivate themselves, and they also had this experience of being closer to their families, because they were spending all this time with their families as well. So all of these things were positives too.

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, you have these very differential outcomes when people are learning at home. Some people are feeling more secure and more supported. Others are feeling completely distracted because there's a lot going on in the background. You've got the whole problem of whether student should be required to turn their cameras on, which, in some cases, they really don't want to do for good reason.

Sarah: Yeah. And I would say that the consensus is that teachers did not feel they had the right to tell any student to turn on their cameras. There were privacy issues that a lot of the teachers were worried about as well, because students might come on in their pajamas and the teacher's like, "I don't want to see my students in their pajamas. I don't want to see their bedrooms." Everybody, it feels like their boundary's being crossed and that they didn't feel comfortable with. And I think that the majority of the teachers felt that the situation was just so strange that they didn't really know how to judge what they needed to do next. So it was part of this, not being able to read the room, but if you are in a situation with your own class in your own classroom, you can control the environment and the environment is incredibly important to your education. You see this more in elementary, you see the way teachers set up their classrooms in order to support the community they're trying to create and learning. But then when they're teaching students who are in their homes, of course, they have no control then. And that was a big thing. The environment in which students are learning in their classrooms, you'd be surprised at how much thought the teachers put into making sure that things are arranged in a way that will support learning. And they couldn't do that when the kids were doing it from home.

Cameron: You wrote towards the end of the paper, you said, "I'm not sure if engaged pedagogy is even possible online."

Sarah: Yeah.

Cameron: Can you unpack that for me?

Sarah: Yeah. So, we haven't completely defined what engaged pedagogy is. And as I said in the paper, you're creating in your students civic self-awareness and agency within the classroom and beyond. And you do that through the interactions between the students. They're engaging with ideas in a way that they all feel that they can challenge each other and still know that they still care about each other. And that, yeah, I'm not sure how you do that online. Maybe it's doable. I don't know. I don't have a huge amount of experience teaching online. And the teachers that I was working with, they're only a couple of them that had a lot of experience with it, but just based on their experiences, it didn't feel like it was possible. So, that is concerning given that marginalized students really need engaged pedagogy in order to be able to participate. And so it's a huge worry.

Cameron: Were you able to get at some of the differences amongst different groups of teachers? We looked at what you just mentioned with the different kinds of students, is this intersectionality of the learning experience with disability and poverty and so on. What about the differences between teachers? What did you observe there?

Sarah: So the things that I looked at in terms of their ages, the amount of experience they had as teachers, and even if there were elementary and secondary. For the most part, I didn't find that those things made that big a difference. So, I had some people that were close to retirement that were excited about learning new things, and some that were close to retirement who was like, I just can't deal with this anymore. I'm out of here. And then there was exactly the same sentiment in the younger ones. So there were some that were brand new and they were like, yeah, this is great. I'm learning all this new stuff. It's hard, but I can do it. And others again, who were brand new who were like, I don't know if I can do this teaching thing. So those things did not seem to affect the experience, and age didn't seem to have an effect.

Cameron: So what happens with the results of your work? Where do you think that you can take this? Do you take it to policymakers? Do you take it to teachers? Do you just bring it into the classroom and teach better yourself?

Sarah: Yeah. I think it's all of those things. Of course, we have to do our ....

Cameron: Well, you have to pick one! Which one?

Sarah: [laughs] As you know, I've published the journal article, but I've also, I also did a report, which I shared with the participants and with the federations and the College of Teachers. So I went to the Ministry and people in education. So I sent it to groups that are into that sort of thing. And I also have made a point of doing interviews. So I've done some radio shows and a public lecture, and I'm doing this podcast. So there are those sorts of things. Of course, whatever I do in my research as is true with all of us, is going to influence the way I teach. I feel I've learned a lot about being really intentional about creating community. I was always trying to do that, but now I think I have a much more specific conception of what needs to be done, that isn't quite as wooly as it had been just from learning from experience. So, yeah, you say I have to choose one, but it's really all of those things.

Cameron: Wow. This is such an important transition that we've gone through as a society. And it seems to me that it has been so intensely felt in the classrooms and in our education systems. So it's really wonderful to learn from you about the kinds of things that are coming out of this study. What's next? Have you got any future studies planned along this line?

Sarah: The next thing has to be the follow-up. I've maintained connections with the interviewees. Obviously all the surveys were anonymous. And so, if when a journalist contacts me, I contact the teachers and ask them what they think. So that, that sort of conduit exists. But I think the next thing is to see how have things gone in the last two years post-pandemic, because there's been a lot of talk about the academic deficits that have been introduced. I don't really like that term. I think it denies some of richness of just how people learn, but it is something that I want to explore.

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative). You mentioned that you shared the results with the participants. Did you get a response back? Did they see themselves in the study?

Sarah: Yes. And actually I should say that because I tend to have a very social-justice approach to my research, my participants are my audience, so they're my primary audience. So yeah, of course, I have to do the publications and I have to speak to media, et cetera. But it's my participants that tell me if the study is authentic or not. So, yes, before I released that report beyond the participants, I waited for feedback and they gave me some feedback and I integrated, either in thinking about what I need to do next, or in the way I had done my interpretations, because for qualitative research, I don't feel -- and any qualitative researcher would say this -- it's not really authentic until you've checked with the participants that you actually got them right.

Cameron: Mm-hmm (affirmative). They become active participants, not just passive participants that you observe.

Sarah: Yeah, absolutely. Because the people, well, they're ends in themselves, I can't just use them. So we do this ...

Cameron: Oh, it can be done. It can be done!

Sarah: It can be done, but I won't do that. To me, that's unethical. So, yeah, always they get to see the report and give me feedback.

Cameron: I am really looking forward to finding out what comes next from this research, because as a university professor, I'm deeply involved in this too. I want to know what happens next. We're going back to the classroom in January. And I hope that somehow I do that better than I did. And I'm not quite sure how to do that. So you got any tips? Fire them out there and we'll try them out.

Sarah: Everybody wants tips.

Cameron: Well, yeah. "Three things you can do differently in the classroom next year!"

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. Something out of BuzzFeed, but it's funny because, yeah, I am a teacher educator, so of course my students always want tips, because they always think that's the magic bullet, just have a list of tips. And my response is always the same. No, it's complicated actually.

Cameron: Ah. Well, it certainly is. Sarah, thanks for talking with me. It's been an education to talk to an educator.

Sarah: And thank you, Cameron, for having me. I really appreciate this podcast. It's amazing.

Cameron: Thank you so much.

Links

Sarah Barrett’s research website

Credits

Host and producer: Cameron Graham
Production assistant: Andrew Castillo
Photos: York University
Music: Musicbed
Tools: Squadcast, Audacity
Recorded: November 10, 2021
Location: Toronto