Experiences of remote teaching and learning in Ireland during the Covid-19 pandemic (March–May 2020)

Initiated in 2018, Children’s School Lives is an exciting, longitudinal study following 4,000 children in 189 schools through their primary school years. Children’s lived experiences and voices are at the heart of this research. The report, Experiences of Remote Teaching and Learning in Ireland During the Covid-19 Pandemic (March – May 2020), is the second publication arising from the study and focuses on children’s experiences and those of their teachers, principals and families, during the period of school closures earlier this year. The report highlights the important role of education and primary schools in children’s and families’ lives. It also spotlights the centrality of relationships in primary education, those between children and their teacher, between teachers and parents, and relationships between teachers and school leaders. The rich, authentic voices throughout the report give us insights into the many challenges that emerged out of the need to reconfigure and reconceptualise teaching and learning in the context of a global pandemic. This saw primary schooling being relocated from a shared physical space, the classroom, to an online environment, necessitating enormous work, engagement and commitment by study participants—children, parents, teachers and school leaders—to enable teaching and learning to continue. The report also affords us glimpses of how this changed learning
environment impacted, positively and negatively, on children, their families, teachers and school leaders.