2.2 Methods
2.2.1 Research Context
2.2.1.1 Linking Place and Vulnerability During the COVID-19 Pandemic
To further explain the ‘unusual-ness’ of this case study, I will first describe the local setting in which this study takes place. In doing so, I align myself with Keller (2013) by attending to the place-based consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic:
An ethnographically informed history of a contemporary disaster must account for the sites in which that disaster ‘took place’ and engage with those sites as critical sources that allow us to map this intersection of social and physical spaces of vulnerability. (p. 302) This study participants work at eight schools across three public school districts in the Los Angeles, California region, a school context that is considered urban intensive due to its size and density (Milner, 2012). In particular, I focus on teachers at eight different middle and high schools across the region (see Table 2.1). The students in these eight schools are members of a population that emerged as particularly vulnerable as the pandemic progressed. For example, Latinx students make up the largest group of students in the schools –– a statistic reflected not only in the participants’ eight schools but also in the demographics of Los Angeles as a whole.
1 I use the word “hybrid” to represent the districts’ description of the shift from fully remote teaching to a different model. However, the work of Bartlett (2022) highlights the ambiguity of the term hybrid when describing pandemic- modified schooling configurations and calls for the need to discern among hybrid models more closely when
The Latinx community in Los Angeles was impacted particularly hard by the pandemic because they often live in multigenerational households, work jobs that do not allow working from home, and have limited access to information because of local newspaper and church closures
(Caldwell, 2020; NPR, 2020; Zarefsky, 2020).
Participant
Name Middle/High
School Size
% ELL
% FRPL
Student Demographics Amber
Singleton
Edgerton High
School 4750 0% 50% 40% Latinx, 25% White, 20% Asian/Asian American, 10% Filipinx, 5%
African/African American Brad Miller Noether High School 1750 10% 75% 60% Latinx, 15% African/African
American, 15% Asian/Asian American, 10% White, 5% Filipinx
Ezio Martín Rees Middle School 750 15% 80% 80% Latinx, 5% Asian, 5% White, 5%
Filipinx, 5% African/African American Jasmine Lin Nunes High School 2250 20% 50% 70% Asian/Asian American, 20% Latinx,
20% 2+ races, >0% Filipinx, >0% White Jason Schulte Stephens High
School (6-12) 1000 10% 95% 100% Latinx Kasey
Zimmerman Vaughan School 750 0% 15% 40% Latinx, 25% White, 10% Asian/Asian American, 10% 2+ races, 5%
African/African American, >0% Filipinx Kirsten Nagi Petters High School 1500 5% 85% 70% Latinx, 10% African/African
American, 10% White, 5% Asian/Asian American, 5% Filipinx
Linda
Simmons Fern Hunt High
School 1500 20% 85% 70% Latinx, 15% White, 5% Asian, 5%
African/African American, >0% Filipinx Note. This list of teachers includes their school level, approximate school size, and student demographic information. In adherence to the district’s IRB contingencies, all proper names are pseudonyms. School size has been rounded to the nearest multiple of 25 and demographic data has been rounded to the nearest multiple of 5 to prevent reverse lookup of sites.
Table 2.1: Participating Teachers’ School Demographics
In addition to the virus, members of the community also felt the impact of state violence on Black people highlighted by the death of George Floyd in May 2020. In August 2020, Linda brought to light the importance of students’ geographic and social histories as they experience the multiple pandemics (Mitchell, 2022) of COVID-19 and systemic racism simultaneously:
When the sort of reaction after George Floyd was murdered happened, and I'm watching videos of kids storming into shops downtown and an awful lot of my Black students live in that area. All I was thinking was, "Oh, please don’t. Please don't. Please don't get swept up in this. Yes, you have every right to be angry. Yes, you have every right to be out there saying ‘Enough is enough. It's too much. It’s far too much.’ But, please don't."
Because I already had a kid who right at the beginning was ghosting me and then said,
"Sorry I haven't been here. I was incarcerated." (Interview 2, August 2020)
What’s more, most of the schools in this study served Asian American students (in fact, Nunes High School’s student population is a majority Asian/Asian American) – a community that was also affected by a rise in violence and discrimination in the onset of the pandemic in 2020 (Pillai et al., 2021). As Kristen described:
Because I sponsor the Asian Student Club, [students] have been sharing their concerns about going back to school. That’s a very scary thing to think that they have those concerns. I'm realizing, and I even told them, that this would be a project that we should work on, as a club, and that I should try to share with all the staff that we need to find out how students– if they're feeling safe if they're going to go back on campus. In particular, for Asian American students, they probably feel very unsafe and we need to hear their concerns. (Interview 4, March 2021)
In addition to race-based vulnerabilities that surfaced in Los Angeles, the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated socioeconomic inequities among the U.S. population (Los Angeles Times, 2020). Importantly to this study, the quality of education was also found to differ during this time, with high-poverty districts offering less time on schoolwork and more independent busy work than wealthier districts (Belsha, 2020). Indeed, in seven of the eight schools in this study,
50% or more students receive free or reduced-price lunch, a metric that is often used as a proxy for the student body’s socioeconomic status. As Linda reflected on her role as a teacher in her school community, she said:
Just knowing the population we work with, what I said was, “Okay, I can’t in good conscience give them anything that I have to have them learn.” Because when they come back, if it was really necessary, I’m going to feel compelled to reteach it in person, for the kids that didn’t have the opportunity, right? (Interview 1, May 2020)
In these ways, the pandemic drew attention to several “critical ruptures” (Keller, 2013) in the foundation of the U.S. –– and Los Angeles –– as society left the public school districts’
populations exceptionally vulnerable, demonstrating the critical importance of investigating local education stakeholders’ responses to such disproportionate vulnerability.
Additionally, these characteristics contribute to the “urbaness” of this study’s local context. According to Welsh and Swain (2020), one tenet of urban education is that it is “defined as a continuum of conditions dependent on the characteristics, challenges, and context” (p. 97).
Specifically, the public school districts in the Los Angeles area enroll a higher concentration of low-income, minoritized, and multi-lingual students relative to other U.S. rural and suburban districts, and the districts are characterized by a history of mass immigration for economic and social reasons (Welsh & Swain, 2020). Indeed, Los Angeles is described by Milner (2012) as an urban intensive school context because of the large number of people in the city and
consequently the schools, pointing toward the ways the broader environment and outside of school factors are directly connected to what happens inside of the schools. However, I heed Welsh and Swain’s caution to avoid collapsing people, place, and space into a static and
monolithic conception of urban education and recognize that such a conception has historically embodied deficit perspectives. Instead, I aim to situate this study in its geographic and social context in a way that contributes to the dynamic, complex, and socially constructed nature of urban education (Welsh & Swain, 2020).