Susan Dawson, Gary Motteram, and Richard Fay, Manchester Institute of Education, Manchester, England
Andres Mora and Francesco Leoni, Caritas Refugee Education Project, Manchester, England

Caritas Refugee Education Project (CREP) aims to support asylum seekers and refugees to pursue their professional and academic aspirations, whilst catering to their psychosocial needs as newly arrived migrants. Specifically, CREP offers English courses, mentoring, and casework support for university and college aspirants, all of which is delivered in a vibrant community centre that offers wrap around welfare support. The project presently has close to 150 students and approximately 30 volunteers. Being located in the heart of Manchester, England, many of CREP’s volunteers come from the nearby universities and parishes. Many of the volunteers are either active or retired teachers and undergraduate and postgraduate students. This article briefly outlines the experiences of six volunteers (five retired school teachers and one young support worker at the local university) in the first few weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, and offers insights for volunteer development opportunities that arise from that.

Moving online

At the beginning of the pandemic and with the possibility of a national lockdown looming in the UK, the educational coordinator explored how to ensure the continuation of the project. As with other educational institutions worldwide, CREP had to find ways to move classes online. They adopted WhatsApp as the preferred way of communicating with students as it was already familiar to both students and staff (see also Motteram, Dawson, & Al-Masri, 2020). For the synchronous sessions, which were considered vital to continue meeting the overarching aims of the project, the Educational Coordinator chose to use Zoom. This decision was partly informed by recommendations from colleagues in other countries who went into lockdown sooner than the UK.

The study

This article uses data from interviews conducted with the volunteers in June 2020. The interviews form part of a wider data set (including teachers and coordinators) from a project that aimed to explore how educational praxis (morally committed action, Kemmis, 2010, p. 418) was shaped during the COVID-19 lockdown. Interviews with the volunteers covered: pre-lockdown experiences of teaching and the role technology played in that; experiences of teaching online and the challenges and possibilities encountered; their reasons for volunteering with CREP and thoughts for the future. The interviews, which lasted approximately 45 minutes, were conducted via Zoom, audio recorded and then transcribed. The transcriptions were then analysed using inductive and deductive thematic analysis.

Findings and discussion

A common challenge for the retired teachers was learning a new set of technology-related skills and although training in the use of Zoom for teaching purposes was offered for all staff, volunteers were not always available to attend or able to invest that time. For one volunteer, even with training, she admitted she was “so terrified, if anything new happens, I think, oh, what do I do now?” (CI). Others discovered new platforms and gradually taught themselves to use the features for the benefit of their classes:

I'd never heard of Zooming for example, before lockdown, didn't really know what Zoom was … and certainly as regards our work there's a whole sort of new set of skills to be learned from my point of view, which I think we’re taking on board quite well considering our advanced age. (ZH)

Mastering these new technologies gave a sense of achievement with one volunteer saying she was “quite proud actually that I can do it as well as I can” (IU). The education coordinators offered training and support, but did not insist on participation. Instead, they allowed volunteers the freedom to discover ways forward for themselves. Giving volunteers the space to exercise their agency enabled them to develop new skills and increase their own sense of well-being. These opportunities should be encouraged in volunteer settings.

Another challenge noted by the volunteers was teaching reading skills online when many students were accessing classes through a mobile phone and had no printing facilities:

they're only getting a partial lesson I think because they're struggling to see sometimes quite a long text on this small screen. (QG)

While not a volunteer specific issue, it does highlight the need in the current context to find pedagogic solutions that will mitigate against the increasing inequalities in learning and education as a result of the crisis.

The move to online instruction benefitted CREP in several ways. Firstly, CREP was able to double its pool of volunteers (from 15 to 30) by recruiting from a much wider geographical area. Secondly, volunteers saved commuting time. This extra time was used for additional volunteering, and in one case, enabled a volunteer to continue when they had been on the point of giving up. One volunteer stated the main benefit of online teaching as “100%, the fact that … I don’t have to devote as much time to it as a volunteer” (SI).

The increase in volunteers and volunteer hours allowed CREP to offer more one-to-one classes. In these one-to-one classes, the volunteers got to know their students better and discover students’ own areas of expertise. For example, one learner shared how he had “won a prize in the UAE, an International Prize, for creating an online distance learning programme” (IU) which prompted the volunteer to think “wow, here we've got a great expert, what must he think of what we’re doing”. This highlights one possible area for the future development of volunteers: how they can engage the skills and expertise of the students so that “the teacher is no longer merely the one who teaches, but one who is himself taught in dialogue with the students, who in their turn while being taught also teach” (Freire, 1970/1996, p.61). Raising volunteers’ awareness of this reciprocity so that they intentionally seek and encourage the use of students’ expertise allows the learners to give something back to their volunteers and, we suggest, might reduce the need for so much formal technological training.

Conclusion and recommendations

The move online, despite causing some initial anxiety, gave volunteers a sense of pride in their technological achievements and enabled them to build more individualised professional relationships with their students. It also helped increase their understandings of what the students brought with them in terms of skills and knowledge. CREP benefited from an increase in both the number of volunteers, and the time that each one could commit to the classes and students. Recommendations include:

• Informal peer and student led training - Use peer and student support to help volunteers improve their proficiency in online systems. Pair volunteers with another volunteer or student who is proficient in the online systems used to ensure ongoing technical support for volunteers new to online learning.
• Simple online learning platforms - In the first instance, use a low number of simple online systems to coordinate and run volunteer-led education sessions, gradually integrating new software and apps so learners and volunteers can become familiar with them.
• Innovate rather than replicate - Use online systems as a way of expanding the role of the volunteer rather than just replicating what they did in face to face teaching.

References

Freire, P. (1970/1996). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Penguin Books.

Kemmis, S. (2010). What is to be done? The place of action research. Educational Action Research, 18(4), 417–427. https://doi.org/10.1080/09650792.2010.524745

Motteram, G., Dawson, S., & Al-Masri, N. (2020). WhatsApp supported language teacher development: A case study in the Zataari refugee camp. Education and Information Technologies. Online at https://doi.org/10.1007/s10639-020-10233-0