According to UNESCO, by the end of March 2020, nearly 1.5 billion children around the world were at home due to the COVID-19 lockdowns. For students and their parents, remote learning is a new challenge. For schools, it is time to experiment with new forms of teaching.
For the project I contacted parents around the world to let me enter their homes during the daily routine of their children’s study, and during a video call I photographed my phone. What I collected is a series of family snapshots, of the reclamation of a space now used for school, of interactions with family members, but also of solitude. Visually, images are blurry and unsharp, the distance from the subject is measured also with a loss in quality. For me, this is a parallel with remote learning, which is channeled through devices. Scholars state that home learning is effective if students have the technical means and the support of the family. When these are missing, the risk of dropping out of school is high.
The work is part of a collective project that TerraProject is pursuing to explore the relationship between digital technologies used by people during the Covid-19 epidemic.
Banstead, Inghilterra. Kabir, 8 anni, al quarto anno di scuola. Riceve i compiti tramite una app installata sul proprio tablet. Quando finisce i compiti, invia le foto all’insegnante che li corregge. Ogni mattina Kabir segue una lezione su Skype con l’insegnante, il pomeriggio fa lezione di pianoforte e chitarra con Zoom. A Kabir piace il fatto che sia lui ad organizzare la giornata e di essere indipendente. Gli mancano gli amici, ma la videochiamata mattutina lo aiuta a sentirsi in gruppo.
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