More than two months since school resumed in Ottawa, experts at Carleton University say the COVID-19 pandemic negatively affected students, especially those who are BIPOC or from low-income and immigrant households.
Alexandra Arraiz Matute, professor of childhood and youth studies at Carleton University, said the pandemic exacerbated pre-existing inequities between racialized and white students.
“We know that racialized and immigrant families tend to have lower graduation rates in certain communities. And this has to do with myriad factors, the biggest mediating variable is income or poverty,” she said.
Matute’s research interests focus on marginalized communities and the intersections of race and identity in the education system.
Leila Angod is a professor of childhood and youth studies at Carleton. She spoke on the disproportionate challenges Black and Indigenous families faced due to the pandemic, at a panel hosted by Carleton’s Faculty of Arts and Social Science on Sept. 27.
“We don’t need more data to know that schooling in Ontario is anti-Black, is anti-Indigenous, that it is a white settler colonial institution,” she said at the panel.
Fifty per cent of families surveyed reported experiencing anti-Black racism across schools in Toronto, Midhurst and Durham among others, according to a March 2021 report by an advocacy group called The Parents of Black Children (PoBC). The data also shows 26 per cent of incidents involving racist bullying between students is inappropriately dealt with by the school.
Sherwyn Solomon, principal of Le Phare Elementary School in Ottawa, said at the panel immigrant households have also been affected by language barriers.
He explained updates sent to parents regarding school closures and COVID-19 cases written in English made it difficult for immigrant families and those who don’t speak the language to stay informed.
Matute said her research data revealed gaps in technology access posed a barrier to low-income students.
Families with higher socio-economic status were able to pay for new technological requirements that came with distance learning, while lower income families could not afford these tools, she said. This meant students with a lower socio-economic background were left behind in terms of access to online education.
In early 2020, Matute researched the impact of distance learning on racialized immigrant communities, concentrating particularly on family dynamics.
She interviewed eleven families in the Ottawa area.
“[Online learning] put parents in a position where they were having to police their kids to sit down at the computer, help them log on, and then stay sitting at the computer, pay attention, not get distracted [and] do their work,” Matute said. “And a lot of [parents] mentioned that this created this negative relationship with their kids. It added a lot of stress to what was already a really stressful time.”
Matute said it’s important to fix the fundamental issues in our education system before switching to online learning again.
“We can’t move forward with pushing forward with online learning without really taking a look at the foundations of our system, which are really still steeped in a lot of inequality,” she said.
Feature image by Audrey Gunn.
