Learning, Teaching & Teacher Education in a Global Pandemic
On 31 December 2019, a pneumonia of unknown cause was detected in Wuhan, China and reported to the World Health Organization (WHO) Country Office in China. This disease, later identified as a corona virus, was eventually given the name COVID-19. On 30 January 2020, the WHO declared the outbreak as a ‘Public Health Emergency of International Concern‘ and it was finally characterized as a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. As the pandemic has swept across the globe, every aspect of our lives has been permeated, resulting in political, social, and economic upheaval. Governments across the world have responded to the global pandemic in discrete ways and these responses have caused dramatic but different effects on the way people have conducted their daily lives, influencing health, work, commerce, travel, socializing and schooling. As we manage within the crisis, and start to emerge from it, our lives and societies are destined to be changed forever.
The impact on institutions that deliver teacher education has been significant and the experiences of teacher educators are likely to vary across the world. Widespread school closures in many countries have meant that children have been confined to their homes, with their parents and carers as proxy educators, often but not always, with access to remote learning through the internet. In some countries, schools have remained open and this has prompted a different set of challenges for educators. Pandemic conditions have created an environment in which educators in general are finding ways to cope with their changed lives and have needed to rethink how to support learning with the resources at their disposal.
WFATE invites scholarly papers from its global Teacher Education community for a special edition of the WFATE journal that examines how learning, teaching and Teacher Education have fared in the conditions resulting from a global pandemic. Contributors are encouraged to identify and describe the particular conditions that are specific to their global location.
Papers are invited on, but not confined to, the following topics:
• Teacher education in the context of the global pandemic
• Change – to teacher’s lives, education and education systems
• Professional placements for student teachers during the COVID-19 shutdown
• Online and remote teaching
• Learning from home – online and remote learning
• Professional learning of teachers and teacher educators in pandemic conditions
• Learning and teaching in physical isolation
• Monitoring and assessing students under shut-down conditions
• Opportunities and new learnings emerging from a global pandemic
• Children’s perspectives of their worlds in a global pandemic
• Parents as teachers
• School and university closures and changes to school operations.
Guest Editor: Associate Professor Jenene Burke, Federation University Australia
Submissions should be sent to Dr. Ann Shelly, email [email protected] by November 30, 2020.
Questions about the topics and other issues can be directed to Dr. Burke or to Dr. Shelly.
The information about format and structure are found at https://www.worldfate.org/