Pedagogical leadership During times of emergencies

School Communities’ Resilience in the Face of Emergencies 

School personnel faced many challenges in the spring of 2020 due to the worldwide spread of COVID-19 as teaching and other school facilities had to be quickly adapted to the online environment. In this presentation, I will present findings from our unique two-wave data collected in Central Finland. During the first wave, the pandemic was not yet a public concern in Finland (pre-lockdown survey), and during the second wave in mid-May, the schools were reopening after a two-month lockdown (post-lockdown survey). Our study had three objectives. First, we sought to understand the school personnel's point of view on how students were coping with the situation. Second, using job resources and demands framework, we examined changes in school personnel’s well-being (burnout, work engagement, and sense of belonging) from pre- to post-lockdown time, and studied the availability and the role of interpersonal work resources to cope with the situation. Third, relying on the concept of resilience, we identified how personnel coped with and adapted to the situation, and found examples of transformation of practices to support students in the new situation. Through the insights from these studies, I hope to open a conversation about the factors we need to focus on to develop resilient school communities that can support both students and staff during 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 emergencies 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.

Recapturing the Education Space – The Experience of an Adivasi Community

The Viswa Bharati Vidyodaya Trust (VBVT) is a community-driven organization that has worked 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. To be successful in our endeavors, 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 empathize 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 labor 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. 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 were 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.