Sustainability and Student Leadership in the Time of COVID-19

By Anab Ibrahim, Jessica Lobos, Akuja Mading de Garang, Sophie Nicholas, Ronald Omuthe, Monica Llaguno Zambrano, Jessica Winter  and Silvia Yafai

Amidst COVID-19, we have wondered many times how schools and teachers are needing to reinvent themselves in order to allow children around the globe to continue learning. But how many times have we talked about students being reinvented during these new learning processes? Could this be a good opportunity for them to start actively participating in their educational settings and communities?

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COVID-19 and Affect: A View from the United States

By Irv Epstein

I believe that the COVID-19 pandemic has made us realize how central educational interactions are to the many varieties of human experience we regularly encounter. It has also forced us to confront the ambiguities and contradictions that challenge conventional understandings of how those interactions are shaped and what they mean. Although it is my view that many of us as comparative educators have for too long ignored the importance of affect in our daily lives and certainly in our educational endeavors, the need to address the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic forces us to reassess its significance.

What then do I mean by affect?

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Education in the Time of COVID-19 in Jordan: Reflecting on Priority Short Term Responses

by Dina Batshon and Yasmeen Shahzadeh

Photo by Amjad Ghsoun

In Jordan, more than 2 million students across public, private, and United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA) schools have had their education interrupted since schools closed in mid-March. With the spread of COVID-19, Jordan took the quick decision to implement lockdown but to continue with education, albeit delivering its content remotely. Learning from previous emergency situations, the government took note of the importance of maintaining education to provide a sense of normalcy as well as preventing the risk of student dropout from learning interruptions, and developed a quick plan of action.

In this blog, we reflect on the current education system response to COVID-19 in Jordan, and envision further priorities around short-term interventions, based on emerging global resources and knowledge from education in emergency situations.

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Learning to leisure? Leisure in the time of coronavirus

By Brett Lashua

The crisis brought on by coronavirus has shown, perhaps as never before, that leisure is important. As someone with longstanding interests in the sociology of leisure – particularly what young people learn through leisure – I hope to use this blog space to spin out a single thread: that amongst everything else, the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the value of learning to leisure.

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Open and flexible learning – an effective response in the current crisis

By Pat Pridmore

To help prevent further transmission of SARS-CoV-2, educators are currently being challenged to find new ways to teach and support their students at a distance. To help meet this challenge lessons can be learned from a research study called SOFIE (Strengthening Open and Flexible learning to Increase Educational access), which I led along with Chris Yates at the Institute of Education. This study was funded by a grant from the DFID-ESRC Joint Scheme for Poverty Alleviation with findings reported in 2011.

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COVID-19, long economic cycles and the prospects of a new world

By Vincent Carpentier

The eruption of COVID-19 has (re)generated discussions about the possible transition to a new world and a new social contract. This is of course due to the terrible loss of lives and livelihood caused by the virus. This is also because the virus has exposed our personal and collective vulnerability caused by simmering tensions between human and economic developments associated with the ongoing and increasingly important question of inequalities. Signs of these tensions have been widely documented and include amongst others the heroic struggle of the staff of underfunded social and health infrastructures to cope with their public service mission, the lack of social safety nets for many sections of the population, the precarious positions of underpaid key workers and those not able to work from home as well as the very unequal experiences of the lockdown by social groups due to variations in living and housing conditions. These key issues should not hide a sense of solidarity and the growing consensus in public opinion for the need to address these inequalities as well as the beginning of a policy shift. But what comes next? Many commentators stress that the world has to change, that things can never be the same again. Is this the premise of a new world or an ephemeral adaptation driven by survival instinct? Will we go straight back to normality once we are saved and out of an emergency mode? Or will a new, more just social contract emerge?

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How the Covid 19 crisis is exacerbating and embedding communal inequalities in India and Pakistan

By Marie Lall and Kusha Anand

Amidst the COVID-19 lockdowns there has been some amazing generosity in both the public and private sectors to keep people alive. However, not all acts have had positive social outcomes, whether intended or not. Education was forced to move on-line, with most stakeholders completely unprepared. Small differences, for example, in access to infrastructure have the potential to widen adverse education outcomes. We have also seen communities come closer together, sometimes at the cost of excluding the underprivileged and minorities. These acts have amplified the divide further. The link between education, discrimination and disadvantage is particularly pronounced both in India and Pakistan where the spread of the virus has exacerbated existing inequalities.

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The impact of COVID-19 on research ethics

By Fabiana Maglio

COVID-19 is impacting the way research is conducted in humanitarian settings. Field research, evaluations and data collection have suddenly come to a halt with researchers staying at home across the globe. Research projects are hitting pause, longitudinal research studies are facing significant disruption in data gathering, and there is a widespread concern about the future availability of grants or re-allocation of funding.

Photo by author

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Gender-based violence after Ebola: What can we learn from young people in Sierra Leone?

By Jenny Parkes and Jo Heslop 

As the COVID-19 pandemic spreads around the globe, and governments take measures to try to control the virus, there have been distressing signs of rising levels of domestic violence, with surges in calls to helplines in many countries under lockdown. This is not a new phenomenon – in contexts of crises, conflicts and epidemics many studies have documented increases in gender-based violence, highlighting the vulnerabilities of adolescent young women.  What can we learn from previous epidemics, that may help us to protect young people?

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COVID-19: How Nigeria is innovating around education

By Oyindamola Adegboye and Utibe Henshaw

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Nigeria already had about 10.2 million out-of-school children, mostly in the North-East region. However, the nationwide school closure declared by the Federal government has increased the burden of continuing education on policymakers, school administrators, teachers and parents across the country. At The Education Partnership (TEP) Centre, we have been monitoring some of the emerging and homegrown educational responses to the COVID-19 crisis in Nigeria. We are also using our new podcast, Education Unscripted, to promote knowledge sharing and learning in the wake of the pandemic.

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