Abstract:

The COVID-19 pandemic, which shut down much of the United States in March 2020, wreaked havoc across many occupations, including education. As director and instructor of a university-based tutoring program that supports struggling kindergarten to eighth-grade readers one-on-one for an hour a week, I was confronted with the dilemma of having to switch the tutoring program from face-to-face (f2f) to a virtual platform. The center and tutoring program has been in existence for over 50 years. In all of those years, not once has the center run or organized tutoring virtually or on an online platform. All materials, books, and assessments used for tutoring are physically housed in the university's literacy center; at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, we had few digital resources available. The majority of the students tutored in my section of the program's course are English Learners (EL), students who speak a home language other than English, and most are reading a year or more below grade level. This study aims to understand how teaching and learning were mediated by technological tools and the need to locate and use quality digital texts and resources. As well as one educator's experience to facilitate a virtual tutoring program.

Through an autoethnographic lens, I examine my position of duality, first as an instructor of a tutoring program and a member of a marginalized cultural and linguistic group like many of the children we tutored, and second as the director of a literacy center charged with locating digital resources for approximately 40 tutors. Chang (2008) argues that autoethnography is not just a study of self but also a study of the intricacies of the self in collaboration with others situated in a dynamic cultural context. I am the main character of my study, with the caveat that I understand many have contributed to the data I use to tell my story. I do not use just memory to tell my story. Data were collected from video recordings of tutoring sessions, my researcher reflective journal, tutors' emails regarding tutoring and resources, informal virtual meetings with tutors about tutoring, after tutoring debriefing notes with the graduate assistant who worked with me to supervise tutoring and comments from the parents of the tutees' via email correspondence and during a virtual family conference. The following research questions guide this study: 1) What digital resources and structures are needed to organize and host a remote synchronous one-on-one literacy tutoring program for students identified as English Learners (ELs) and struggling readers? And 2) In what ways can a remote synchronous one-on-one tutoring program facilitate active learning?

Data were collected following a qualitative research design and analyzed through a thematic analysis approach. The remote program was structured and approached similarly to the f2f in-person tutoring. An implementation tutoring plan called SMART was created to assist tutors with lesson design and delivery. SMART (Standards, Materials, Activities, Resources, Teaching) was designed to help tutors focus on the standards, the peripheral materials on hand, online activities or strategies for instruction, digital resources needed, and teaching tools. Preliminary findings show that remote tutoring was a practical method for kindergarten to 8th-grade students to receive extra literacy support while still isolating during a global pandemic.

Keywords:

Virtual Tutoring, Online Instruction, Literacy, Auto-Ethnography.