Author: McLain Sidmore

In the past few weeks, we have amassed a large, if somewhat unusual collection of sources ranging from government and school documents on education policy to individual statements on life under Covid-19 lockdowns. Most of the resources cluster around three areas, rural West Virginia, rural Wisconsin, and small towns in the Pacific Northwest offering an ability to compare similar communities in various regions of the country, though there is little examination of the effects on larger cities that have been more thoroughly reported on by major news outlets. These collections are somewhat disparate, and reflect different interests and networks that Rebecca, Jacob, and McLain could access, yet they serve to create a sliver of insight into the lives and relationships of students, elders, and communities during this time. 

 Coming in, we were interested in how the coronavirus pandemic was affecting different generations. We especially wanted to focus on the impacts to children and the elderly and we wanted to capture how these groups were adapting to the pandemic and what their experiences have been. We have been able to meet our goals of connecting with students and the elderly in some senses. That being said we have run into roadblocks at times during the collection process. Many points of view are tough to get during this time so we have had to reconcile that with our goals. Many of our initial ideas for sources have also been tough to reach but we have still been able to talk to a good group of people. Rebecca has been able to get some elderly and student perspectives in her work with her network and McLain and Jacob have both been able to get a variety of sources from children. While we still have to contemplate the voices we are getting and the difficulties in getting sources during this time, we have all been able to meaningfully contribute to our goal of documenting generational divides in the pandemic.

While this work is an entry point into a more diverse sharing of voices, the work of archiving and outreach is by no means over. The voices of children and elders have always been underrepresented in archival records and in a moment when these groups are being disproportionately impacted by illness, isolation, poverty, and lack of technology, these silences will only be exacerbated. Through our work, we have tried to capture the realities of this period for these people, from sweeping policies affecting the education of children, down to the individual reactions of students and elders in a few areas around the country. Yet, beyond this search for individual voices, we also sought to create and test mediums and methods for including these perspectives, wrestling with persistent problems, and, hopefully, offering ideas and clues for future researchers interested in expanding the reach of our archiving project. Week after week, one of our consistent activities was simple outreach, speaking with teachers, students, and elders about why we value their experiences and asking them to share their knowledge with us, and generations to come. We plan to use these experiences and the stories and documents we have collected in an exhibit that looks at the ways in which Covid-19 has impacted people across generational divides, and the ways in which these communities have adapted to foster inter-generational support, share wisdom, and find ways to survive during the pandemic. 

As I look back over the motley collection of artifacts I have assembled for the Plague Year archive, I have come to realize their importance, not merely for the preservation of various materials from this spring, but as in some ways representative of my restrictions and abilities during the pandemic. My mother is a health care worker in a clinic where every patient has a compromised immune system, so I have not entered a building apart from my home for almost two months now. I do not have documents about how my friends are dealing with the disease because college students are going to school across time zones and it is difficult to find times to connect. The documents I have collected, in part, represent my interests and concerns during Covid-19, but they also represent my limitations and my loss of connection with the physical world, or at least to the people in that world. 

 I am experiencing this pandemic at home in Juneau, AK, where so far, we have been lucky to escape the worst effects of the virus. We learned yesterday of the 10th death in the state, the first death in several weeks as the Governor has been slowly reopening. While we have certainly had an easier time with the virus itself, watching the demise of the oil industry and tourism, the two largest industries in the state, has felt a bit like a lucid dream as we fall off a precipice. This is certainly a price I believe we are all willing to pay to protect our communities and I have heard little vocal resistance, but my fears for the future impacts of this pandemic, and my concerns for education, have certainly influenced my interest in documenting how children and students are being impacted. This summer, high school students would have begun working their first jobs as tour guides or fishermen, while younger children would often be left with grandparents while parents worked during the busiest season of the year. Instead, students who were generally brought up to avoid screens (as I recall my elementary school had a total of two computers) are being told to do their schoolwork with inadequate access to devices and increasingly spotty internet access. From my observations out my window it seems that most of them have given up amidst the first signs of spring, and have traded social studies for mud pies in the ditch and bicycle rides. This prompted me to look at the ways in which schools and curriculums are adapting to try to teach students amidst the distractions of quarantine. I intended this to be a broad sampling of the nation’s policies, but I have found that they have begun to cluster around the small towns of the Northwest, those places that, like Juneau, are facing low virus levels at the moment, but steep economic crises from boom and bust economies and problems of isolation. 

I grew up with the repeated avowal that ‘it takes a village to raise a child.’ Teachers and neighbors, elders and aunties, family and friends all have a part in teaching and supporting every child and the breakdown of those relationships are both isolating and worrying for the future. Yet the children running past my window are also heartening in their resilience, looking for ways to overcome their situation, and learning to ride a two-wheeler while they are at it. Of course it is important that these students are missing fundamental time in schools when they should be learning social studies, but as some communities’ distance-learning plans are beginning to grasp, at the moment, caring for your community may just be the most important civics lesson these children can learn.