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UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF VIRTUAL EDUCATION ON YOUNG CHILDREN AND THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN TEACHERS, PARENTS, AND CHILDREN DURING A GLOBAL PANDEMIC

The global COVID 19 pandemic dramatically altered the early education teaching landscape worldwide. The switch to a virtual education model left many educators, parents, and students scrambling to access appropriate technologies, adjust complex schedules, and attempt to learn in a radically different way. For very young kindergarten-age children, their introduction to formal education via virtual technologies in 2020/2021 has been particularly challenging. To understand more about the inter-related experiences of children, teachers, and parents engaged in kindergarten learning during this challenging time, we conducted a series of online in-depth interviews with the key stakeholders in this endeavor. The goal of our study was to determine how parents and children coped with a virtual education model, how teachers adapted or abandoned teaching practices, and how future virtual learning technologies might best support students, parents, and their teachers in achieving their goals. Our findings describe communication issues, the new (and not always welcome) roles for both teachers and parents as coaches, therapists, and teacher-parent, and emotional familial conflicts about learning and working together during lockdown. We propose four interactive virtual learning interfaces to address some of the issues uncovered and examine their potential implications with invested stakeholders.