Today Is the Tomorrow We Should Have Prepared for Yesterday: Rebuilding Our Classrooms to Facilitate Student-Centered, Teacher-Sustaining, Tech-Supported Education
Citation
Garcia, Merideth; Marlatt, Rick; McDermott, Maureen; O’Byrne, W. Ian. (2021) Today is the tomorrow we should have prepared for yesterday: Rebuilding our classrooms to facilitate student-centered, teacher-sustaining, tech-supported education. Voices from the Middle, 28(4), 21–24.
Abstract
The spring of 2020 was difficult. ELA teachers and students learned that we can do hard things; parents and teachers rallied to support one another for the sake of students and their learning as we fought to preserve the best of what schooling has to offer. This piece, written during the transition to emergency remote teaching, offers four guidelines for teaching across in-person and virtual environments: actively problematize pedagogy and tools, prioritize community, explain the why, and learn with students. Drawing on multimodal pedagogy and critical approaches to educational technology, the authors argue that this moment is an opportunity to re-center what we know to be most valuable about education: the peer and mentor relationships that underpin students’ learning and the opportunities to pursue meaningful social and intellectual goals.
Notes
This was written in the thick of the chaos — spring and summer of 2020, before anyone knew how long this was going to last or what schooling was going to look like on the other side. The four guidelines we offer aren’t particularly novel; they’re things good teachers have always known. The pandemic just made them visible in a new way.
What I kept coming back to in my contributions to this piece was the data question. When we moved instruction into commercial platforms — Google Classroom, Zoom, Schoology — we moved students’ intellectual and social lives into corporate-owned spaces that collect and aggregate their data. We didn’t ask students or families whether that was okay. We just did it, because we were in crisis mode and those were the tools available.
That discomfort is worth sitting with. The urgency of the moment made us sloppy about privacy, ownership, and consent in ways that matter — especially for middle level students who were already navigating social media’s influence on their identities. Building a domain of one’s own, giving students ownership of their digital presence and output, is not just a nice pedagogical idea. In a moment when every keystroke is being commodified, it’s an ethical imperative.