Keeping distance new norm for schools?

Keeping your distance may prove to be habit forming. Following the strict advice of our chief medical officers of health, the vast majority of citizens and organizations are practising physical distancing to contain the spread of COVID-19. If the new public health conventions become ingrained and persist beyond the immediate crisis, the fundamental change in social norms will profoundly alter life in public settings, particularly in schools and classrooms.

Seeing images of public schools in Taipei, Taiwan, in full operation during the COVID-19 health crisis, has been jarring, if not downright shocking. Based upon hard lessons gleaned from the 2003 SARS pandemic, Taiwanese authorities, including school heads, were quick to recognize the crisis and activated stringent emergency health management plans to keep schools running instead of simply closing them down. Students at Daija Elementary School in Taipei were asked to disinfect their hands and shoes before entering the school building, while a security guard took their temperature, and, once in class, the children were seated in separated rows wearing masks. What set that school apart, and drew international attention, was the sight of children eating their lunches while sitting behind bright yellow dividers on their desks.

With the pandemic upon us, education planners and policy-makers need to look beyond the immediate crisis and start making plans for the resumption of in-person schooling, likely months from now. A whole generation of students, parents and families, having survived the ravages of this virus, may not only be more receptive to online learning, but may be expecting a different kind of K-12 education.

Today’s student-centred, interactive classroom based upon “hands-on” learning was, it is becoming clear, greatly advanced by the widespread adoption of vaccines and related health programs. The emergency health risk posed by COVID-19 is more reminiscent of the scourge of childhood diseases, unchecked by vaccines, up until the 1960s. While class sizes were larger back then, the traditional classroom exemplified social distancing because children were seated in individual desks, spaced apart, lined up before moving from place to place, and were taught personal hygiene. Classroom design and seating since the 1970s has tended to focus on creating settings that support “active learning” and such reputedly progressive teaching methods as learning circles, co-operative learning and project-based groupings.

Scanning North American classroom environment research, it’s striking how many research projects were undertaken to demonstrate that teaching children sitting in rows was detrimental to student engagement. Neglected research on physical proximity and anxieties about crowding will get a much closer look in the postCOVID-19 era of education. Coming out of household quarantine and re-entering school, students, parents and teachers will be far more conscious of infectious diseases and the physical conditions contributing to its transmission. Ministries of education, school districts and principals will likely give a much higher priority to providing teaching and learning in classrooms meeting stricter health protection standards.

Academic studies of “peers in proximity” and the few analyzing the “mixing patterns of students in school environments” do provide us with signposts for deeper dives. One 2015 Dutch study of interpersonal processes in the classroom, conducted by Yvonne Van den Berg, demonstrates how “a careful management of physical distance between classmates” can improve classroom climate, but it focuses almost exclusively on rectifying identified imbalances in social status in classes where students choose their own seats.

The role of children in the community spread of such respiratory diseases as H1N1 and COVID-19 has attracted relatively little attention from researchers based in graduate schools of education. One Canadian health policy study, produced in 2013 by University of Toronto researcher Laena Maunula, may have compounded the problem. It claimed that public health messages were “dangerous” because they reinforced “bio power” and “governmentality” (i.e., a coercive state reducing citizens to “trained subjectivities”).

For more promising disease-prevention studies, we have to look to Europe and the pioneering work of two research teams, led by Marcel Salathé of the Salathe Lab at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and Juliette Stehlé of Marseille, working with the University of Lyon-based National Influenza Centre. Utilizing wireless sensor network technology, they have studied the social networks in both primary and secondary schools that facilitate infectious disease transmission. Logging the data for CPIs (close proximity interactions), the researchers honed-in on the problem presented by schools as high potential sites for pandemic spread. Followup studies by American health researchers applied this research and concluded that extensive school-based interventions regulating free student movement, as an alternative to school closure, can significantly reduce contacts and potential exposure to infectious diseases.

A 2018 Rand Corporation study examined American school influenza pandemic policies and practices. It found that, while spacing out desks and limiting student interactions in hallways and classrooms reduced transmission rates, only four of 50 U.S. states (Georgia, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia) had firm policies authorizing the full range of social distancing regulations. Ontario’s 2013 Health Plan for an Influenza Epidemic, much like those south of the border, relied upon school closures and made no provision for resumption of school after a pandemic.

Schools reopening after the hiatus will not look or feel the same, given the prospects of a second wave. Taiwanese schools might represent an extreme akin to a dystopian village, but post-COVID-19 schools will, in all likelihood, incorporate some of those rigid protocols, at least until student, parent and teacher anxieties subside in the coming years.

Paul W. Bennett is the research director of the Schoolhouse Institute in Halifax and national co-ordinator of researchED, a U.K.-based organization of educators committed to advancing evidence-based education and

teaching practices.

SCHOOLS REOPENING ... WILL NOT LOOK OR FEEL THE SAME. — PAUL W. BENNETT