This book examines how online learning environments shape students’ daily school experiences and outcomes. Rapid advances in technology are reshaping the landscape of schooling around the world. While online learning had been a growing in popularity for years, it is becoming more prevalent than ever in a post-pandemic world. COVID-19 forced schools to provide emergency remote learning opportunities, and in most wealthy nations, that was largely accomplished through a mix of synchronous and asynchronous online learning. Online learning is now a common part of high school students’ timetables and digital pedagogy is a staple in teacher education programs. While educational psychologists and ed tech researchers are tirelessly working to establish best practices for online learning and critical scholars warn of the dangers of wholesale adoption of technology, there are few descriptive, sociological studies that take account of broad student outcomes (beyond test scores) in online environments. This study made use of the pandemic to look at students’ academic engagement and emotional well-being in online settings across school affluence and academic program type, as well as through the lenses of race and gender identity. This research digs into how students engaged differently with school at this time given their different dimensions of privilege.

Christine Corso is Postdoctoral Fellow at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She studies the ways that schools reinforce or disrupt intergenerational cycles of advantage and disadvantage in society.