Children's ideas about COVID-19 and learning loss: Interviews with 10 second-graders

Abstract

In 2020 and 2021, there has been extensive scholarly and popular discussion about children's learning loss due to COVID-19 and its related school closures. This conversation generally overlooks the voices of young children. This study, set in a US context where children spent a year or more attending school exclusively remotely, reports from interviews with 10 second-graders about how they conceive of loss related to COVID-19 and particularly what it might mean to lose learning. The study finds that the children have extensive ideas about what it means to lose something tangible or intangible, and that their theories about loss are based in well-understood personal experience. It also shows how children use loss narratives to make sense of sociopolitical events and concepts in the world around them, and it offers the possibility that the upheaval wrought by COVID-19 has helped some children become quite emotionally aware and able not only to tolerate but also adaptively defend against difficult feelings. The article emphasizes the importance of foregrounding children's ideas and voices in making sense of their educational experiences.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began to close US public schools in 2020, it was difficult to know what the long-range impact would be. One concept discussed emphatically in scholarly and popular educational discourse was that of “learning loss,” with a simultaneous counternarrative focusing on the problematic overly rosy view of what schools have to offer (Donnelly and Patrinos, 2022; Love, 2020). Children globally are performing about one-third of a year behind where they would normally be in mathematics and literacy because of the school they missed out on during the most severe periods of the pandemic (Baumgaertner, 2023). This has the most profound impacts on children who are already underserved by a staunchly inequitable system of public education, and it could have long-range economic implications (Betthäuser et al., 2023). At the same time as this change is significant, however, to call it “learning loss” is to assume a specific definition of learning—one that elevates mathematics and literal reading above other domains of knowledge and skill, and one that assumes learning can be not just accurately, but also completely, measured by standardized tests.

This article, along with many other voices (Biesta, 2015, 2017; Moss, 2012; Taubman, 2010), seeks to problematize that hegemonic definition of learning. Children learned in many other ways, some newly rich, because of the pandemic. COVID has had devastating effects on many children and families, and everyone owes it to children to take that seriously. Taking those effects seriously, however, need not mean leaning into a definition of learning that is predetermined to position children as deficient. Instead, we should approach these children with curiosity and due respect to the kinds of learning they might be able to show adults, and the ways they might help an educational establishment rethink a problematically narrow definition of learning.

Narratives around learning loss should include the voices of children. It is irresponsible to report on a cohort from the outside, using only their scores on standardized measures and reports about them from those with power over them. As Brushwood-Rose and Bimm (2021) point out, educational research about the impact of social, political, and natural disasters attends insufficiently to children's lives. We do not know enough about how children make sense internally of catastrophe, and that is a problem when it comes to making ethical decisions allowing for children's agency.

This article examines what one small group of seven- and eight-year-old children consider that they learned and lost because of COVID. All of the children in this study associated COVID with some kind of loss, but usually not with loss of learning. They were eager to talk about their stories. I begin with a brief review of literature around epistemological and ethical considerations of listening to children. Next, I summarize what has been written about COVID learning loss in the USA, which functions as a case study of a country with deep-seated educational inequities and a massively flawed response to the global health crisis. I detail my methodology and provide an introduction to the children in the study. After that, I offer results and discussion, organized by category. I close with a summary of the study's findings and recommendations for ongoing work.

This study's results offer a reminder of the desire that children feel to be known, tell their stories, and share their ideas about life. There are substantial losses associated with these last years of development and of education, and these have been incurred inequitably. Nonetheless, it is possible to take these losses and turn them into a story—something that children can and do use to make sense of their worlds. This requires careful time, facilitation, and attention to the limits children set when it becomes too hard. By listening to children, we can make transformative, ethical decisions about how to hold, educate, and work with them moving forward; we can also broaden a commitment to a vision of children based not in deficit but in serious current knowledge and rich awareness alongside ongoing creative possibility.

The importance of listening to children

Listening to children is imperative in any process seeking to understand how the pandemic has affected them, educationally or otherwise. As a researcher with a general interest in psychoanalytic theory, I have always been oriented toward taking children's expressions of emotion seriously. My initial inclination was to situate the data from this project in trauma theory, with the assumption that COVID has been traumatic for children. Closer and more careful rereading of the data, however, has shown me a different story—one less mired in trauma and more about pushing me, and readers, toward curiosity.

Davies (2014) names the importance of “emergent listening” when spending time with children (21). This is a kind of listening that involves openness to the new but simultaneous awareness of the weight and sometimes value of the old (23). There is perpetually a risk that the new will be unthinkingly incorporated into the old. When I listened to the children in this study and incorporated them into what I already knew, understood, and assumed about trauma, I was making a methodological foreclosure that was not true to what the children were telling me. This is more than a misinterpretation; it is an act of erasure. To allow emergent procedures to take place, I had to reinterpret it with less theoretical prejudice (Davies, 2014: 23). Listening emergently to what children tell us about their COVID experiences means openness to seeing them in new ways. This revision can, in turn, shape how adults interact with children, thus constructing new educational environments that transgress the status quo.

Yoon and Templeton (2019) convey the ever-present risk of an instrumentarian approach to listening to children—listening to build curriculum, to exclaim over how cute they are, or to better orient them toward meeting our adult, often capitalist, goals. Instead, Yoon and Templeton suggest that adults might do better to focus on listening to children because they are expert, thoughtful people, with things to share and rich, complex worlds. There is nothing simple about listening to children either ethically or procedurally. Carnevale (2020) pinpoints some ethical complexities. What is the obligation of a medical provider faced with a child who does not want cancer treatment but whose parents desperately do? Carnevale has no way around this sort of conundrum, but argues for a “thick” version of listening to children—one that takes into account their relational, sociocultural, and political framework. Voice, Carnevale explains, is not de facto agentic. A child's voice receives appropriate epistemological and ethical attention when its expression carries implications for the decisions that are subsequently made.

Costa Carvalho (2022) asks adults to probe what exactly we are talking about when we say we are “listening to children.” She warns against an excessively paternalistic iteration of listening, encouraging listening without a predetermined theoretical frame or set of assumptions about voice or outcome. Listening is not enough, she argues, if a rationalist adult perspective is always imposed on what is heard. Murris (2013: 245) names the challenge that adults often encounter in listening to children as putting “metaphoric sticks in their ears.” It can be threatening to listen to a child in a way that allows opening new conceptions because these new conceptions so often point out cracks and flaws in their precursors. We need, however, to studiously acknowledge those moments with children when our assumptions, like mine about trauma, prevent us from letting their realities emerge.

Certainly, I do not pretend that my work with the children in this study represents some kind of ideal example of listening to children emergently and openly. If anything, I have repeatedly been humbled by my own assumptions and the ways they foreclose genuine listening. What I hope is that presenting some of the findings of my conversations with children offers some opportunity to listen with me by proxy and engage in consideration of the new ideas about children that might emerge from that exercise. Stories about children's COVID experiences have not been monolithic, but they have been deficient in children's voices (Brushwood-Rose and Bimm, 2021), and that is an ethical flaw as well as a lost opportunity. This article considers the voices of children around some of the themes and stories that adults are telling about them. First, however, we will take a closer look at one of the most dominant stories: that of COVID-related learning loss.

Learning loss

Concerns about COVID learning loss started to appear in popular education journalism in March 2020. Right after the New York City public schools closed at the start of New York's first COVID surge, a New York Times article pronounced: “The long term effects of closure are extremely daunting, and will unquestionably lead to extensive learning loss for scores of students” (Shapiro, 2020). When it became clear how many American students would spend most of the 2020–2021 academic year learning online, concerns about learning loss became more frequently articulated. A search of the New York Times database from March 2020 through July 2022 reveals 791 hits for “COVID learning loss.”

Storey and Zhang's (2021) meta-analysis of studies documenting learning loss using standardized test scores modestly supports concerns about academic regression. During distance learning, young children were not getting the instruction they usually receive in foundational literacy and numeracy skills. Many young children had trouble navigating the world of online school altogether (Morin, 2021). The beginning of the 2021–2022 academic year in the USA saw a sense of confirmation of parent and educator fears (National Center for Education Statistics, 2022).

The learning-loss narrative precipitates some decisions that have undoubtedly helped some children in particular ways. It has led to the allocation of resources to remedial programming (Schweig et al., 2022). It opens up conversations about preparing teachers to work with children who have had inadequate access to the usual kinds of academic instruction (Darling-Hammond and Hyler, 2020). The inequities inherent to the learning-loss framework play a key role in furthering national conversation in the USA around the systemic injustices that have long plagued the formal education system (Simon, 2021).

At the same time, learning loss as a construct relies on a rendition of learning that is rooted in the learning sciences to the exclusion of other disciplines and approaches (Taubman, 2010), and disengaged from the ways children often make sense of their minds, their growth, and their lives. We will see that the children in this study generally find the whole idea of learning loss problematic or even absurd; their ideas offer a different reading of what they have been through, why it matters, and what adults might reasonably decide to do next.

Methods

I worked with Ms Marino, a second-grade teacher at Clearview Elementary.¹ Clearview is a public Prekindergarten–Grade 4 school in a rural area in the north-eastern USA. From each child whose family consented to participation I also obtained oral assent. Dunphy (2005) recommends a “flexible approach” to interviewing children as one way of supporting children's agency. I followed her suggestions of remaining attuned to the intensity of thought and emotion, and watching their facial expressions and body language alongside attending to their words. This had a discernible effect on the interviews, which again functions as a reification of the child subjects’ agency. In one case, I concluded an interview well before completion because the child was growing obviously uncomfortable with engagement. The absence of further data from that child represents her imprint on this work.

The child interviews took place in a one-on-one format at a small table in a private hallway. I recorded the interviews on my phone and took notes on my laptop. I asked each child the same questions to start with, then followed up individually. The initial questions were:

• Tell me a little about yourself and what you like to do.

• What does it mean to you to lose something? Can you lose something, like learning, that isn’t necessarily a thing you can touch?

• Why do you think grown-ups are concerned with children losing learning because of COVID?

• What do you remember about the beginning of COVID?

• What do you remember about remote school?

• What do you think you lost because of COVID?

• What should grown-ups know about what it's like to be a child right now?

With the exception of the child whose interview was truncated, the children spoke to me willingly and at great length. The interviews lasted from 10 minutes to an hour.

Of the 10 children I interviewed, nine were eight years old and one was seven. Six were white, two were Asian American, one was African American and one was Latinx. All were born in the USA and had English as their first language. Two also spoke another language at home. Four of the participants had individualized education plans (IEPs). Five were girls and five were boys. Six qualified for free and reduced lunches. Seven reported having had COVID at some point over the preceding two years. All were vaccinated but one still wore a mask to school. They approximately represented the demographic of their school within these categories.

Results and discussion

In this section, I present my results, which are organized thematically. First, I showcase the different theories of loss that the children in the study espoused. Then, I show how they went from discussing their ideas about COVID to explaining other theories and understandings about how the world works. Finally, I engage with the children's detailed expressions of emotion related to COVID and loss; here, I also show how the children co-constructed some of our interviews by setting boundaries when it came to discussing difficult emotions. I offer possible interpretations of the children's expressions, but I am cognizant of the limits of adult interpretation in listening to children; because of that, I also gesture toward other possible meanings.

Children's theories about loss

Although I began each interview by explaining to the children that I was interested in their ideas about what adults call “learning loss” associated with COVID, most of the children in the study associated the idea of loss with losing concrete objects. Rosie explained that loss is “if I had, like, a stuffed animal, and I was playing with it once and then the next day I didn’t know where it was.” Ian summarized a relationship between how much you care about something and how it feels to lose it:

If I lose something that I like a lot, then I’m sad, but if I don’t like it, then I’m not sad. Like yesterday I got a new fidget. If I lost it, I would be upset, because it's one of my favorites. But if I lost my bracelet Pop-it, I wouldn’t be that sad. I barely play with it.

For both Rosie and Ian, losing a thing they care about is familiar but also confusing. Where is that thing? It struck me how easy it was for them to imagine a scenario around losing, and how logical and expected it sounded. There is a passivity in these formulations: losing a toy is something that just happens. Making decisions about the feelings they will voice in relation to such hypothetical events may be a way for Rosie and Ian to act more agentively. Ian gets to say what matters to him and what does not.

Several of the children connected my question about learning loss to beloved pets dying or being given away. They understood “loss” as a word that could also signify death, and the loss of pets was closer to the forefront of their minds in some cases than the loss of learning. Naomi's dog's death was a profound experience. “I lost a dog, he died,” Naomi said. “It hurt. It was my first dog I ever met. My mom really thought we wouldn’t have to have an animal die before I was a teenager.” Naomi paused and continued: “We got a new dog, though. We got him when he was a puppy. He would not move from the spot, he was just staring and staring at me!” Naomi loved her new puppy but did not rely on this to mask the pain of the initial loss, which she was open and unashamed about describing.

Olivia's depiction of losing an animal was less coherent. She said in a cheerful voice: “My dad cooked my hamster in a closet! I have no idea what happened. That was my old, old hamster, and I lost so many fish. My mom told me.” I was not sure what to make of Olivia's story. Then she grew more serious:

Those things? I had them for a long time. And it's scary to lose them because, like, I love those things, those animals. We had this cat named Mittens. She had white on her paws, and my Nani said: “I’m going to get rid of this cat because you’re not going to be here no more, to take care of it” [because their family was moving]. And I was so sad. And then she died; that was the saddest thing.

The children seemed to be saying something about my learning-loss question through these answers: “I know what it means to lose,” they implied, “and I am concerned about how it feels, but my sadness has little to do with math or reading skills.”

Some of the children found the idea of losing learning abjectly ridiculous. Debbie, for example, said: “No, it's not possible to lose learning. I guess it means when you’re, like, forgetting? But like in COVID, when you’re online, you could just play video games all the time and not pay attention.” She shrugged. For Debbie, not paying attention in school is a fact of life, something a child might decide to do, but it is active and not connected with loss, which most of the children found passive as a construct.

Several children, however, did think that COVID, and particularly “Zoom school,” resulted in confusion, if not loss. Uniformly, their first comments about Zoom school were around how difficult it was to manage the technology. Naomi said: “I could not find anything on Zoom. We don’t have a neat family; all we remember is when sports happen and where. But it would always turn out it was on the shelf right next to me.” Bobby explained:

Going to school on Zoom was hard. If you wanted help sometimes, your iPad just wouldn’t work. You were trying to talk but it would not let you talk and you just had to figure it out. A lot of the things I didn’t finish.

These comments are largely in sync with what parents and educators reported young children struggling with during the long stretch of remote learning (Klosky et al., 2022).

A few of the children also acknowledged liking Zoom school, specifically because it let them opt out of the aspects of learning, or of being in school, that they typically found unpleasant or meaningless (e.g. see Fleming, 2020). Diya was particularly articulate about this:

I felt, like, I don’t need to learn this stuff! But then, I figured out a way how to listen and watch cartoons. I was in my Zoom; I clicked out but it was still going on. I just put it on mute and watched cartoons. But then my mom would see me in the mirror and she said: “Oh Diya, you’re watching cartoons. You get back into your Zoom, no!” But, like, why do I even need a Zoom?

Like Debbie, Diya did not find it remarkable that she preferred not to attend to what school wanted her to do. Diya took her question about Zoom and then extended it to make a statement about school more broadly, postulating something that a lot of children ponder but few dare to articulate to an adult (Stearns, 2022). “There's nothing important in school,” she said. “You just learn something over and all over again. You just learn and learn and learn.” I asked Diya why she thought that might matter to grown-ups, and she shrugged: “children don’t want to learn. They want to do funner things.” These statements raise questions about what children think learning is and why it might be something that seems so disconnected, for instance, from “fun.” When Diya says that children do not want to learn, she is working with the same definition of learning as those who decry COVID learning loss: learning as the insertion of knowledge and linear development of measurable skills (Storey and Zhang, 2021). What is the word for what Diya is doing when she figures out a way to listen and watch cartoons? What, if not learning, is she doing when she questions the purpose of the institution of school?

Making sense of COVID, making sense of the world

The kind of figuring out that Diya and Debbie name as part of their internal processes during Zoom school is something I saw the children do in response to other questions in the interviews. Often, the children would segue from describing the impact of COVID societally to sharing aspects of their understandings of issues in the world. Clark and Stratham (2005) point to the acknowledgement of childhood expertise as a key to listening to children authentically. When children tell adults something that they have worked out and internalized, they are remaking the world; conditions change, if slightly, to reflect the ways they are being perceived. In this section, I delineate some of the ways the children made sense of COVID and the changes it wrought, and also how this sense-making process translated to other topics.

When I asked Will what it was like to eventually return to in-person school, he launched into a description of what he knew about how laws are made:

the law said you had to wear a mask everywhere we had to go. There was laws about that; first the president made them, then the principal made them, then we all were following them, and then they changed again, I think maybe the government.

He transitioned into discussing friends and family members who missed out on specific fun things. This is something that many of us did during the pandemic's height—wrestle with the different scales on which we all exist, the ways world and national events trickle into our most intimate moments.

Several children made an immediate connection between the concept of loss and different issues of injustice. For example, when Bobby was answering the question about whether COVID might have led to learning loss, he said: “Well maybe … because sometimes people don’t have the opportunity to go to schools. Like, for private schools, you have to pay money.” Bobby paused for a moment, then continued: “if you can’t go to school, you don’t get job choices, and then you might get stuck with a job you don’t like that much.” The idea of loss in the moment prompted Bobby to try to figure out what it would mean to lose access to education. Like Will, he toggled between his immediate reality of daily school and the threat of a disease and a world he knew to be bigger and less fair than his perception of his life.

Ian also connected directly to the idea of injustice when I asked whether it is possible to lose something like learning, something you cannot touch. A white child, he took this opportunity to work through something he understood about racial injustice. “You can lose the right to do something,” Ian said. “Like when you, like when, if you’re a Black person, you could lose the right to do something that white people can do. But that was worse longer ago, but now it's a little better.” When I did not say anything, he continued, this time using the word “learn,” perhaps to indicate that he recalled my original question: “We didn’t learn about that, though, well, we kind of did, but I forget when I first learned it. Like, I don’t really know how it feels.” Ian takes the idea of loss as related to COVID and applies it to the idea of losing a right. He shares something he knows and then he loses track of his initial sense of certainty. This leads him to a startling humility in his articulation—the admission that “I don’t really know how it feels.”

Detailed descriptions of emotion

Many of the children used the interviews to offer detailed descriptions of emotion. Scripted social and emotional learning programs portray young children as deficient in articulating their emotions (Stearns, 2019). The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (2023) hails the need for more explicit curricula that help students achieve self-awareness, and social and emotional learning proponents and programs emphasize a need for children to learn specific language for identifying and expressing emotions (Martinez, 2017; Stangl et al., 2017). I have previously argued that listening to children often shows a tremendous indigenous capacity for identifying and expressing emotion, however (Stearns, 2019). Many of the children in this study delved deeply into their emotions and then clearly communicated when they had had enough, allowing me to interactively and ethically determine that an interview was over.

Dan offers one example of a child's precise access to language for depicting emotions. He told of learning about COVID when schools initially shut down during his kindergarten year: “I was nervous, anxious … I wanted to see my friends, have special days.” His language was exact and the reasons behind his emotions clear. Other children's most detailed descriptions of their emotions came out when they were describing what it feels like to lose something. Debbie said right away: “It's upsetting. Because you really like the thing that you lost. It's upsetting.” Neither Dan nor Debbie struggled to put words to their difficult feelings, and both were equipped to justify these emotions contextually to a new adult.

Diya, who brought a stuffed octopus to our interview, hugged it tightly while she told me about the feelings connected with loss: “Usually, when I lose something that is really important to me, I actually feel really sad. I feel like my whole world is destroyed.” The octopus may have given Diya solace and even solidarity. She was not the only one to use dramatic language to describe the concept of experiencing a loss. Olivia associated the question about losing something you cannot touch with getting something wrong. “When that happens,” she told me, “I feel like I just let everyone down … I get really scared. Like I’m in really bad trouble. I get this like smashing feeling in my head.”

Zeman et al. (2006) and other proponents of social and emotional learning describe the importance of expression as part of overall emotional regulation—something with primacy in the world of school (e.g. see Jones and Kahn, 2017). Diya’s and Olivia's expressions, however, cannot be reduced to demonstrations of their capacities for language or potential to develop regulation. Their words and movements—Diya hugging the octopus and Olivia shaking her head back and forth—also have aesthetic merit. When they talk about how it feels to lose something, they are putting something meaningful into the world. They change my question about learning loss into a question about something more important to them: their inner life, extreme distress, and the always imperfect relationship among somatic, emotional, and linguistic domains. They changed the topic of the interview into something they needed it to be about; in doing so, they reminded me again of the limits to a narrow paradigm for learning.

Of all the children in this study, the one who had been the sickest with COVID was Dan. Dan's parents consented to his participation but said that he had specific struggles with COVID they felt I should know about. Their message is quoted with their consent:

Dan was diagnosed with COVID in early 2021 before many of the scientific advances were around … After a few days, Dan was diagnosed with MIS-C (Multiple Inflammatory System in Children) … It was very new, very serious and very scary. Short story is that we nearly lost him.

The message went on to explain that while Dan had made a full physical recovery, he was still coping with the emotional fallout. He worked with a therapist for three months and, in his parents’ words, “Dan suffers from PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder]. The whole experience left him a different person.” They explained that he often found it therapeutic to talk about the experience, which is why they consented to his participation, but that he was easily triggered into meltdowns. They recommended I approach him “with a gentle touch.”

Ramaekers and Suissa (2011) remind educators that there are always limits to parents’ capacity to speak for their children, and caution against a temptation to claim parental knowledge of a child as more expert than the child's understanding of themself. I was interested in Dan's understanding of his story, but found it challenging, reading his parents’ words, to question their expertise at all. I established a rapport with Dan and talked about a range of other topics before we started discussing COVID. Dan soon interrupted and asked if I wanted to know how sick he was. “I was in the hospital,” he said matter-of-factly. When I asked him to tell me what he remembered about that, he said: “I remember a lot. A LOT … you know the feeling like plastic gloves?” I nodded. “I still feel the feeling on my arm,” he said. “Like I remember the exact picture of my room, right in my head right now.” He described some of the doctors and nurses he met, and the television shows he remembered watching in the hospital.

I told Dan how impressed I was by the details of his memory. He shrugged:

Sometimes I forget stuff, though. Like … a nightmare. It was in my normal house, and I woke up and had an entire school day. And I felt fine, and then I went on the bus until I just blanked and suddenly I was flying off a skyscraper! I had to blink three times in a row … I can basically do anything in a dream. Like have a ginormous apple and cut it in half with my eyelids.

I commented: “Wow, that's really powerful.” And Dan told me: “I have a really big imagination. So I can fit a lot of space inside my head.”

Dan went through a harrowing experience, although never without adult support and access to medical and psychological care. He could turn this event into a narrative that gave him solace (Zembylas, 2020). He knew how to attend to his dreams and derive power from his imagination. He knew how to do what Silin (2018) explains is a kind of play: using language to work with his power, think about his sadness, and introduce himself into the world. Undoubtedly, Dan got some of these things from talking with his parents, and some from working with a therapist as well as medical providers and teachers interested in supporting him. What comes out in his description is a picture of a child with a strong grasp not only of language, but also of the complexities of memory, creativity, and emotional life. This is not to say that Dan's fear and painful memories are mitigated by some sort of falsely positive silver lining. It is just that they are not the whole story, just like learning loss and deficit cannot be seen as either absent or absolute for any children who have lived through these past several years in education and society.

Several children also set a clear boundary around their willingness to discuss complicated emotions. Bobby, who detailed many losses and challenges associated with COVID, stopped suddenly about 45 minutes into our interview, looked at me, and shrugged, saying: “But actually, I’ve really lost nothing because of COVID.” This might seem like an expression of shame related to how much he had already shared (Rimé et al., 1991). It is also possible that Bobby meant to say that, even though he could pinpoint a lot of the things he and others had lost, he did not consider any of these things noteworthy; alternatively, he might have remembered that he was not culturally permitted to stay with negative affect (Stearns, 2017). In any case, Bobby signaled definitively that our interview was over, and even that I was not allowed to know exactly why or what was going on in his mind. He was ready to put some space between us, and so he did.

Bobby's discursive move was made all the more remarkable by how closely Rosie mirrored it. She was verbose throughout our interview, sharing all sorts of stories and thoughts. Then, she suddenly stopped, looked at me, and said: “I don’t really know anything else. Actually … I don’t really know anything.” Rosie had already demonstrated expertise and insight, so her disclaimer caught me off guard. Was she ending the interview because she was uncomfortable with her disclosures or because she was tired? Did she sense that she had shared too much or something she said was wrong somehow? Regardless, she used that simple line—“I don’t really know anything”—to change the tone and tenor of our interview, redirect my curiosity, and draw a firm boundary around our time together.

Naomi also ended our interview definitively. Toward the end of her depiction of what it is like to be a child today, she started to laugh raucously. She stopped for a moment, composed herself, and then started laughing again, looking at me and asking: “How are you even alive? How are any of us even alive?” The complexity of the whole pandemic seemed to hit her all at once, and her response was this outburst. Maybe she wanted to remind me to stay curious, to ask about things beyond the relatively narrow parameters of learning and loss, to pay attention to how much more widely the social upheaval of COVID could impact a child and their way of wondering. In any case, Naomi started laughing again so uncontrollably that she could barely stay still. She asked if she could go and get a drink of water and then go back to her classroom.

Diya ended her interview by firmly changing the subject. “Well, the problem,” Diya said, “is now there's this whole new thing, this other pandemic. It's called monkeypox.” She paused for a moment, staring into space, and then continued: “And being a child is also kind of amazing. You have something called toys. They’re animals, but they’re like a living thing, but they’re not because they’re toys.” Conversely to Naomi, whose contemplation led her to ever broader questions, Diya narrowed her scope to a very concrete set of explanations. Both children, however, showed me something about how much they knew about the world and how to be in it, as well as just how alienating being a child can feel. “You are asking all the wrong questions,” their answers communicated, and listening to them may help adults in general remember just how many questions there are to ask.

When social and emotional learning programming and curricula start with the assumption that children need to be taught about emotional regulation and expression, they fail to consider the capacities that children already have to access, richly experience, and communicate emotions. The children in this section remind us not only that children can express complicated, ambivalent, and sophisticated emotion, but also that they are often just waiting for an opportunity to do so, when they will be heard, met, and acknowledged without correction or instruction.

Conclusions

This study presents a picture of children who are cognizant of where they fit into a complicated historical moment and engaged in their education, as well as other aspects of the world around them. These are children who are capable of describing their emotional landscapes, putting words to needs and feelings, and leaning into stories to help them make sense of who they are and how the different puzzling pieces of their lives and worlds fit together. They are also children who have lived through substantial educational and societal upheaval. That they have lived through this collectively, not only with their families and classmates but also with their entire generational cohort, is simultaneously helpful and destabilizing; it means that there is some solidarity, but also that there is no vision of someone who is entirely protected from the impacts of COVID.

Looking at the different stories that the children in this study offer, it is clear that loss alone is not an adequate framework for making sense of their lives during this time, and that a narrow definition of learning loss does a disservice to the curiosity, wonder, and emotional richness they convey to a curious listener or reader. Yet it would not be fair to these children to ignore the difficulties presented to them by COVID: the challenges associated with sickness and a constant fear of sickness, the confusion and sometimes alienation of a year or more of remote school, and the demand to coexist with adults who were themselves in a state of confusion and upheaval. The truth is something more like a middle ground, and middle grounds make less compelling takeaways than extreme, one-sided pictures. The middle ground, however, is where children can show the admirable extent of their capacity to hold the sad and the beautiful at once, to exist in the complex ambivalence where loss and gain coexist.

It is not fair to tell a story of this generation of children from the outside, without taking their specific words and stories into careful consideration. Their stories matter because of their precision and because of how much humanity they hold. It is a damaging flaw in the educational establishment that there is not enough space or time for educators to really listen to children—to listen emergently and remain open to redefining key concepts, like learning, based on what children communicate and build. If these children have proved anything, it is how pressing their stories and expertise are, how much they want to be known, and how much of themselves there is to know.

I implore future researchers to remember the centrality of children's voices in understanding their lives. When we hear phrases like “learning loss,” we need to insist on questioning their premise. Teacher educators should remind their students to take the time to listen to the stories and voices of the children they work with, and to cultivate an internal openness to changing their minds, decisions, and actions because of what comes from that listening, instead of trying to fit it into a preordained theoretical or political framework. Teachers and teacher educators alike should work to resist either/or kinds of models: either children have experienced learning loss or they are completely up to speed; either children overall are sad and traumatized or they are resilient, emotionally healthy, and adapted. The truth is almost always somewhere in between, as we can read into almost all the quotations and stories in this article, and simplifying it is a way of neglecting the humanity of children.

Author biography

Clio Stearns is an assistant professor of Education at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. Her scholarship focuses on centering and amplifying children's voices, and on understanding the emotional lives of children and teachers in classrooms.