Pedagogical leadership During the times of emergencies

Positioning educational and pedagogical leadership during times of emergency: A brief look at theory and prior research

Mika and Marc position educational leadership during emergency in the context of existing research and theorization on educational leadership, pedagogical leadership, and crisis leadership.  While prior research has lessons that are applicable to emergencies such as COVID, there is precious little research directly on leading education during times such as these.  They will thus summarise a few key research findings before posing the question: what were our lived experiences as leaders during COVID, and what can we learn from them to help leaders in future emergencies?

Re‑imagining curriculum in India: Charting a path beyond the pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic has made visible the sharp economic, health, caste-based, gender, and educational inequalities that the disadvantaged face in India. Curriculum is ordinarily viewed as a tool for regulating and adapting modern educational systems to society’s needs and trends. But most governments have been unwilling to rethink post-pandemic education, despite the loss of livelihoods, food, and shelter – accentuated by educational inequality and institutionalized via neoliberal reforms. The current pandemic compels us to examine the meanings and purposes of education from a socio-historical perspective, to understand how questions of equity and justice, rooted in India’s Constitution, can be woven into curricula and pedagogic approaches. This article reflects on the role that curriculum can play in enabling an ecologically and socially just and connected world. This curricular response includes recognizing the significance of subaltern disciplines and imagining transformative pedagogies that can help reclaim education spaces and sustain epistemic justice.

Culturally Centered Pedagogy

Finland’s long-held advantage of its basic education is its guaranteed access to education regardless of families’ socioeconomic status. However, equity in immigrant education has come under scrutiny. The rise in multicultural-ethnic student populations in Finnish schools suggests increased attention on how culturally centered pedagogy can make a  positive difference in the quality of education and engender stronger alignment between the written, taught, learned, and experienced curricula. Students need to see themselves within the curriculum and this is at the core of culturally centered pedagogy. School stakeholders can be cognizant of the intersecting axes that build pathways towards inclusive education and how such approaches impact students. It is a practice, an ongoing process, and should be integrated into school culture. Thus, school stakeholders would do well to consider the connections between culturally centered pedagogies as a hallmark of strong curricula and student success.

In this session, participants will be introduced to culturally centered theories and models of instruction. Conversations will center on identifying how the theories and models may serve as best practices that conceptually align with student growth model frameworks that confirm the fundamental goal of education that all students can succeed. Session outcomes seek to foster conversation on how educators may reimagine curriculum to support vulnerable students from multicultural-ethnic backgrounds. 

Recapturing the education space – The Experience of an Adivasi Community

The Viswa Bharati Vidyodaya Trust (VBVT) is a community-driven organization that works with the indigenous communities of Gudalur in Tamil Nadu (India) on matters related to their education for the past thirty years. Over the last twenty-five years, we have been working with the vision of establishing culturally appropriate and relevant learning systems for tribal children with the active participation of the community. In this presentation, we would like to delineate the approaches and strategies taken to increase enrolment and learning levels amongst these children within 15 years. 

The clarion call for establishing an institution to operate within the space of tribal education came from the land rights movement of the indigenous people here. During the early years of our work, we were entering a community with extremely low literacy and even lower enrolment rates. In order to be successful in our endeavours, an understanding of the nature of problems faced by the community and its dynamicity was crucial. 

Ranging from the issues posed by government schools that neither empathise nor respond to the cultural mores and needs of the community, to a large number of these children being pushed out of schools into the informal labour market, there are various systemic hurdles facing a child from an indigenous community that deepen the social emergency of inequity and injustice. However, as the world faced the Covid-19 pandemic, these existing emergencies were further amplified within the Adivasi community. In this time, it was the Trust’s efforts over the years to recapture the space for tribal education and design it according to their needs that was already in place and could be employed without any hesitation by the teachers. The teachers were able to reach out to children in their villages, and create innovative spaces that helped not only the children but also the parents to observe closely the happenings of the classroom and how they could be involved.