Examining the Schooling Desires of Youth During the COVID-19 Crisis

As schools across the US and around the world closed their physical buildings to stop the spread of COVID-19, students, teachers, families, and communities grappled with the shift to online learning. While emerging research examines how educators navigated this shift, little is known about how students experienced schooling as the pandemic unfolded and how their experiences may contribute to emerging calls for reimagining education. In this essay, Joanne E. Marciano, Lee Melvin M. Peralta, and Ji Soo Lee look at how youth navigated online learning in the sixteen months after their schools closed. Using weekly interviews with youth conducted between March 2020 and June 2021, they center the voices of black, Lebanese American, and white students who experienced limited access to economic resources and call attention to the (post)pandemic schooling experiences they needed and desired.