Teaching and Learning in COVID-19 Lockdown in Scotland: Teachers’ Engaged Pedagogy

This paper reports on a study of teachers’ perceptions of teaching and learning in Scotland during the COVID-19 pandemic through the lens of engaged pedagogy and the ideas of bell hooks. It aimed to explore the different ways that teachers experienced teaching and learning during this time and the impact this may have had on teacher identity. Sixty teachers and head teachers were interviewed using MS Teams in the period April-June, 2020. For this paper, 18 transcripts were analyzed by members of the research team. Four key themes emerged from the interview data: Working from home, parental engagement, teacher identity, and changes in pedagogy. Each of these themes were discussed in terms of concepts such as engaged pedagogy, agency, self-actualization, recognition and boundary transgression situated in the work of bell hooks. The idea of boundaries wove itself throughout our data as teachers expressed how the transgression of boundaries was occurring in multiple, and often contradictory, ways in pedagogical, professional, institutional and personal spaces and systems. We see in our data evidence of a shift in practice not just in the way teachers are ‘doing’ education but also, perhaps, in the way that teachers are ‘being’ as educators as they adapt to different ways of knowing. This study provides a unique exploration of a time and space in Scotland during 2020. However, the themes and understandings that emerged are of relevance to educators internationally. Schools across the world were impacted by various lockdowns imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic and teachers faced a common set of challenges that were resolved via re-negotiation and recognition of individual and collective agency to create new pedagogies.

Engaging the social: Community engaged pedagogy in the context of decolonization and transformation at the University of Cape Town

Globally, higher education is at a crossroads on so many levels: funding, course development, who our students are, what knowledge is relevant for the world of work and beyond, what kinds of students do we want to graduate, and who are we as educators. All these questions (and more) have been around for some time; the current COVID-19 context however brings them even more sharply to the fore. This paper responds to the prompt about how we train professionals for the future so that they don’t participate in systems of oppression and inequality. It was written in 2017 in response to a conference on social and epistemic justice in the wake of the 2015 student protest movements and was written collaboratively by an intergenerational group of educators working on a course in the Engineering and Built Environment (EBE) Faculty at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. All of us have a strong commitment to social justice, and to providing engineering students with an opportunity to think about their professional identity through the lens of community engagement. While written before the onset of COVID-19, we believe that the arguments we make are pertinent to the current context. Drawing on the Honors’ thesis of one member of our group, we sought to reflect on and analyze our work in this context. In particular, the principles of multi-centricity, indigeneity and reflexivity (Dei, 2014) proved useful in making sense of our practice and our work together.

What Freirean Critical Pedagogy Says and Overlooks from a Durkheimian Perspective

“Critical pedagogy” has become a prevalent grammar furthering the necessity of a change in pedagogy from a banking‐style to problem‐posing approach, which it argues will facilitate students’ development of independent values and equip them to lead the liberation of society from authoritarianism into democracy. To achieve this, classrooms need to serve as cultural forums, through which either engaged pedagogy or negotiated authority empowers teachers and students to engage in free dialogues that problematize school textbooks as “cultural politics.” This empowerment demands that teachers perform as transformative intellectuals, dedicating themselves to the amelioration of inequity in educational results by reconstructing new texts, making them more accessible to working‐class students. While these theoretical lexicons envision a new perspective for the “educational function,” alleviation of the phenomenon of cultural reproduction can only occur if critical pedagogists pay more attention to academic curricula. Student achievements in such curricula, which respond to the demands of the social division of labor, have a profound influence on their potential social mobility.

Teacher Professional Development: Mobile and Limited Technology-enhanced Pedagogy

This qualitative case study seeks to document and understand the influence of technology integrated/supported professional development (PD) on preK-12 grade teachers in Nepal. The study focuses on the value of collaborative, university-school relationships to foster buy-in among teachers to integrate technology for increased student learning. We used the TPACK framework and sociocultural theory of learning to understand how and why technology integration at a rural school in a poor country would support more engaged pedagogy for learning. The PDs were co-designed by the researchers with teachers’ input, and further supported in its implementation when teachers tried out the new strategies in their classrooms. Data was collected utilizing methods of observations, self-reflective fieldnotes, informal interviews, and artifacts. Data analysis indicated that effective and locally suitable technology integration relies on building relationships with the teachers and school community; technology integration needs to be focused on the local needs of students and teachers based on their resources and curricular demands; and while limited (mobile) technology integration can support better learning, student-centered inquiry-based pedagogy needs to guide technology use in class. Furthermore, the study argues that recognizing and valuing local cultural and school contexts are central to successful PD in technology integration.

Transdisciplinary, Community-Engaged Pedagogy for Undergraduate and Graduate Student Engagement in Challenging Times

When the COVID-19 pandemic required all higher education learning to move to remote or online formats, students were challenged to maintain a sense of community and to advance in their education. By focusing on the immediate, human needs of students, IdeasCongress - a community-engaged experiential learning course with a curricular emphasis on transferable skills - flourished in the remote synchronous format. The only significant change was to shift the topic of the course to #RecoverTogether to guide our students in imagining a path through the pandemic while supporting local charities by developing plans for mitigating the impact that the pandemic was having on their service model. This paper outlines a case study of the course and reflections upon the experience of teaching during the pandemic restrictions, supported by student feedback from the September-December (Fall) 2020 semester. Based on this evidence, the approach appeared to be effective for student retention and engagement, and increased student feelings of connectedness to both the campus and the local community. The paper highlights key lessons learned while teaching and learning during challenging times and describe the teaching approaches used to support students.