A THEORETICAL STUDY OF THE IMPACT OF CORONA VIRUS CRISIS ON LEARNERS' SOCIAL INTERACTION IN KENYAN LEARNING INSTITUTIONS

Abstract

The education sector worldwide has greatly been impacted negatively by corona virus crisis, the republic of Kenya included. This is because teaching and learning activities in all learning institutions have severely been disrupted. The worst hit learners are the primary and secondary school candidates who should sit for their national examinations at the end of this year. The other learners whose education has been affected negatively are the unprivileged, vulnerable, marginalized, special needs and poor learners whose families are mainly found in urban informal settlements, refugee camps, rural hard to reach areas and internally displaced people camps. This is because their guardians or parents depend on donations, small scale farming, vendition, informal employment and small scale businesses to fend for their families. Corona virus crisis has compromised the financial ability of these families dismally especially when it comes to financing school related expenditure like paying for online classes, buying learning materials like textbook, revision materials and others. Learners from this disadvantaged backgrounds always prefer to be taught physically by a teacher rather than being taught remotely or online. This is because physical teaching help them to closely interact socially and bond physically with their teacher. The online education and distance learning which has been implemented by the Kenyan government through the Ministry of Education do not allow learners to have a personal relationship and intimate interaction with the online teacher. Also online teaching do not favour such learners as most of them do not have access to mediums like smartphone, internet connectivity, computers, televisions, radios, among others. This has widened inequality in access to relevant quality education by such disadvantaged learners. There is need to examine these challenges and propose suitable remedies which can be utilized during and after this corona virus crisis by educationalist in order to ensure uninterrupted learning in educational institutions in future. Thus this write up will address this gist in this study. Since this study is a theoretical review, it will review secondary data material to discuss the challenges and remedies of corona virus crisis on social interaction in Kenyan institutions of learning with special reference to learners. This theoretical review is based on the Classical Liberal Theory of Equal Opportunities advocated by Sherman and Wood.