Wellbeing and Resilience Education

COVID-19 and Its Impact on Education

Mathew A. White, Faye McCallum, Mathew A. White, Faye McCallum

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000391992
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Classroom Management

Wellbeing and Resilience Education engages with the immediate impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the theoretical and applied elements of wellbeing and resilience education. It explores the implications for students, teachers, and teaching from a transdisciplinary and international perspective. Featuring thirteen chapters written by 27 academics from across the globe, it includes new transdisciplinary research by organisational psychologists, psychologists, neuroscientists, policy experts and education researchers. The book comprises a wide range of topics including: appreciative inquiry, educational leadership, refugee education, resilience education, designing online courses, teacher wellbeing and community responses during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This timely volume will be of interest to academics, initial teacher educators, postgraduate students, school leaders and policymakers researching the field of wellbeing, resilience, education, schools, and schooling.

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Crisis or catalyst? Examining COVID-19’s implications for wellbeing and resilience education

Mathew A. White and Faye McCallum

Introduction

As governments across the globe introduced restrictions to slow down the spread of the coronavirus, educators scrambled to flatten the education impact curve (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020). In some parts of the world, schools remained open. Teachers developed hybrid models of online teaching with online face-to-face teaching (synchronous) or pre-recorded teaching material (asynchronous) or adopted fully online learning and teaching strategies (Hill et al., 2020; Viner et al., 2020). This book investigates the immediate impact of COVID-19 on education and educational systems from international perspectives and explores issues related to the future of schools, schooling and education. As Viner et al. (2020) and Zhu and Liu (2020) contend, we argue that COVID-19 has accelerated change and, in some cases, hastened improvements in several educational areas, recent publications by Harris (2020) investigate this from a school leadership lens, and Zhao (2020) boldly calls for schools to ‘reimagine and recreate human institutions’ (p. 1) in a post-COVID-19 world. In this book, we examine the influence of the pandemic through the themes of wellbeing and resilience. Various chapters investigate and discuss the impact on teachers and teachers’ work, initial teacher education, university responses to COVID-19, the role of wellbeing theory in progressing the field, data collected during the first wave of the pandemic, program enhancements and the perspective of refugee children.

In this chapter, we reflect on the immediate impact of COVID-19. This is then placed into an educational context by adapting Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological framework for human development as the theoretical framework for the chapter. Next, we explore the implications for teachers and teaching and students (La Velle et al., 2020). We present operational definitions of wellbeing and resilience for this book and reflect on related educational equity issues, as raised by Azevedo et al. (2020) and Bacher-Hicks et al. (2020). Health publications have developed various models to explain how public health measures flatten the health curve and effects of COVID-19, including various government restrictions (such as the Victorian State Government in Australia’s Stage 4 restrictions, which implemented a curfew between 8 pm and 5 am from 2 August 2020). This chapter proposes an education model to interpret the pandemic’s immediate impact during the first 10 months of the crisis. Our proposed model explores how educational institutions and systems (e.g. government departments, schools, universities and teachers) have sought to increase education capacity, adopt online learning and teaching strategies, modify curriculum, form hybrid teaching tools and shift modes of teaching. The model links current research on wellbeing and resilience education with issues related to student belonging and the unexpected and continuous mental health difficulties faced by students, teachers, school leaders and parents (Roman, 2020). Finally, we provide an overview of how this book was created and the details of each chapter.

COVID-19: the defining health crisis of our time

Before COVID-19, education already operated within multifaceted and complex state, national and international systems (Jacobson et al., 2019). The escalation of a global economy has driven competition among many nations, changing the social, political and economic landscapes and educational systems within these nations (Veugelers, 2020a, 2020b). Nevertheless, it appears that in less than 10 months, COVID-19 has systematically dismantled elements of globalisation not only in economic terms but also at a political, social and educational level (Douglas et al., 2020). Recent publications argue that education, and initial teacher education specifically, ‘operate within a highly complex world that is mediated by multi-layered political, social and educational arenas’ (Alexander et al., 2020, p. 3). What does this landscape look like now?

It is difficult to imagine that as people across the world celebrated New Year’s Eve, a burgeoning health crisis that would touch all aspects of life rapidly across the world was unfolding. On 31 December 2019, the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Country Office in the People’s Republic of China became aware of a media release from the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission about a cluster of ‘viral pneumonia’ cases (ProMED, 2019). Within 24 hours, WHO activated its Incident Management Support Team (IMST) and requested more details (WHO, 2017). By 9 January 2020, WHO identified it as a new strain of coronavirus, named COVID-19, and is now referred to by its official designation: SARS-CoV-2. In this book, we will refer to the pandemic as COVID-19. On 11 January 2020, the first death was recorded in China. By 13 January, the first case appeared in Thailand, then Japan; on 21 January, it reached the United States of America (the USA), and, by 24 January, it was in France and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Looking back at the experiences learnt from earlier pandemics, including H1N1 and Ebola, WHO determined the new strategy. The growth of COVID-19 cases then began to accelerate throughout China, Europe and the Americas. On 26 March 2020, the WHO Director-General addressed an Extraordinary G20 Summit on COVID-19. At this stage, 500,000 people were infected, 20,000 deaths were recorded, and the virus was characterised as ‘the defining health crisis of our time’. By 4 April 2020, 1 million cases of COVID-19 were confirmed worldwide (WHO, 2020) escalating to over 100 million by January 2021 and climbing (Johns Hopkins University, 2021).

Health systems across the globe were overwhelmed, and, within the space of months, the broader social impacts of COVID-19 rapidly appeared as the world experienced the scale of the disaster (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization [UNESCO], 2020). As reported in the media, there were immediate government recommendations and restrictions implemented at various stages across the world. These included practising good personal hygiene, physical distancing, limitations on the number of people in public gatherings, wearing face masks, mandatory isolation of those with COVID-19 and those suspected of having it, wide scale and in some instances free mobile testing clinics and quarantine (UNESCO, 2020; Viner et al., 2020; WHO, 2020). During the early months, there was widespread public concern over the pandemic, panic buying of many goods in supermarkets around March (Dave et al., 2020; Devi, 2020).

A crisis or catalyst for education

Is COVID-19 the defining education crisis or catalyst of our time? It is what Peters (2017) classifies as a wicked problem in public policy, which are ‘emerging policy problems that … [do] not correspond neatly to the conventional models of policy analysis used at the time’ (p. 385). What is less clear is whether COVID-19 has triggered an education crisis or is a catalyst for change (Reimers & Schleicher, 2020). For example, in a June 2020 report for McKinsey & Company, Dorn et al. (2020) present statistical modelling to investigate the impact of the pandemic on the US education system, and especially on low-income, black and Hispanic Americans (pp. 2–3). Dorn et al. (2020) hypothesise that the ‘COVID-19 closures will probably increase high-school drop-out rates (currently 6.5 percent for Hispanic, 5.5 percent for black, and 3.9 percent for white students, respectively)’ (p. 6). Similarly, in a report prepared for the World Bank Group, Azevedo (2020) explores the global impact of school closures due to the pandemic and contends that worldwide nearly 7 million students from primary up to secondary education could drop out due to the income shock of the pandemic alone. Students from the current cohort could, on average, face a reduction of $355, $872 or $1,408 in yearly earnings and ‘globally, a school shutdown of 5 months could generate learning losses that have a present value of $10 trillion’ (p. 1).

In an article, examining how school leaders are reforming education because of the pandemic, Harris (2020) uses a supernova metaphor for the impact of COVID-19: that is, the explosion of a star and largest explosion in space (NASA, 2018). For example, Harris (2020) notes that the growing discourse on COVID-19’s impact on education is ‘polarised’. There is discourse calling for a new normal in education that tends to be optimistic and buoyant, embracing the transition to online learning and the potential implications for teachers and students. Conversely, another discourse by Van Lancker and Parolin (2020) focuses on more entrenched systematic inequalities that exist within systems and sectors in education and how the pandemic has accelerated existing education crises. At the school leadership level, Harris (2020) reflects on the challenges faced by school leadership and provocatively examines whether school leadership is in crisis. Harris (2020) warns that ‘by treating COVID-19 as a short-term crisis, however, it has been proposed that an important opportunity to change schools and school systems for the better will be missed’. Yet Zhao (2011, 2012, 2015, 2020), who has previously called for the reform of education systems for 21st-century learning, asserts that this may be the opportunity education needs to advance and, deep in the system, move towards a fourth education revolution. For example, when we consider the rapid transition to fully online learning as a result of the pandemic, it has been seen that schools, universities and other learning providers have transitioned rapidly into online education in the space of weeks. In contrast, it has taken many years of comprehensive and considered change management processes to achieve the same outcome.

COVID-19 schooling, teaching and student wellbeing

The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the most significant disruptions to education globally since the Second World War (Azevedo, 2020). However, unlike earlier pandemics such as the Zika Virus, West African Ebola, H1N1, AIDS, Asian Flu, Polio and Spanish Flu, this disruption has taken place at the same time as students around the world have access to modern technologies that make them connected in ways that were previously the realm of science fiction (OECD, 2020; Reimers & Schleicher, 2020; WHO, 2020). The speed of COVID-19’s transmission across the globe has brutally illustrated how interconnected the world has become. For example, as governments across the world adopted different measures to mitigate the spread of the virus, people transitioned to work from home arrangements and governments began the closure of schools. UNESCO (2020) claims that by 24 May 2020, 1,194,497,798 school learners were affected, including 68.2% of total enrolled learners across 148 countrywide closures. Further, countries including Australia, Finland, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, Sweden and the USA implemented localised school closures depending on the number of cases in various provinces and territories. However, unlike earlier pandemics, technology has enabled learners across the world the opportunity to show, support and cultivate online learning environments in unexpected ways (UNESCO, 2020; WHO, 2020).

Figure 1.1 is proposed as a model to problematise and interpret the immediate impact and disruption caused by COVID-19 in education. With Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) framework, the model has enabled us to organise the various themes and chapters of this book. For example, the education impact curve illustrates the sharp initial impact and decline over time of COVID-19 on education. We argue that almost all schools, teachers, school leaders and systems will be somewhere along the educational disruption curve depending upon the number of cases in each country, the local contexts, government policy on coronavirus restrictions and implementation of these restrictions more broadly. In the initial stages of the pandemic, across the world, there was a sharp and immediate educational impact culminating in a total of 91.3% of total enrolled learners in schools worldwide impacted by COVID-19 restrictions (UNESCO, 2020). The grey arrow depicts how governments responded to increased institutional ability across systems, and how individual schools operationalised these restrictions to maintain student learning as many turned to online learning management systems. Here we see evidence of widespread adoption of online learning with many existing face-to-face classes transferred immediately into the online environment. The goal of increasing the institutional capacity of teachers via technology and the implementation of online learning meant that teachers were aiming to flatten the educational impact curve and disruption experienced by students as they were no longer at school.

Figure 1.1 COVID-19 and its impact on schooling, teaching and student wellbeing

Defining wellbeing and resilience education

Tesar and Peters (2020) assert that wellbeing is the zeitgeist of the past decade. Well before COVID-19 appeared as the significant disruption for 2020, concerns around student wellbeing and teacher resilience in education have been broadly documented. As mentioned by Marsh et al. (2019) and Vella and Pai (2019), the research terms ‘wellbeing’ and ‘resilience...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributor biographies
• 1 Crisis or catalyst? Examining COVID-19’s implications for wellbeing and resilience education
• 2 Wellbeing from the outside-in: how mirror flourishing elevates collective wellbeing both within and beyond the classroom
• 3 A comparative study of wellbeing in students: Tecmilenio case
• 4 UPRIGHT – well-being & resilience education: disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic
• 5 How could school leaders improve the flourishing of teachers in the COVID-19 pandemic?
• 6 Why embedding character education in schools matters: key learnings from our research on character strengths
• 7 Supporting English language education for children from refugee backgrounds in Australian schools
• 8 Designing, delivering, and evaluating resilience programs in post-secondary institutions in times of COVID-19: ten key considerations
• 9 Enhancing school – university pre-service teacher professional experience with online wellbeing masterclasses during COVID-19
• 10 Teachers’ wellbeing during times of change and disruption
• 11 Wellbeing literacy as an emancipatory and transformative capability
• 12 Destruction to regeneration: how community trauma and disruption can precipitate collective transformation
• 13 Flourishing Students in a time of change
• Index