Resilient Sustainable Education for the Future of Education

Author(s):  
Ebba S. I. Ossiannilsson

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic affected all economic sectors and disrupted many areas of our lives, especially education. More than 1.7 billion learners in over 200 countries around the world were affected, and these numbers will continue to increase in 2021 and beyond. Therefore, the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic must be understood in order to be better prepared for future disruptions. There is a need to recognize that education is an investment in rebuilding. The key lessons learned are that the future of education needs to be rethought without forgetting the past. Certainly, there is room for improvement in the technical area, but most importantly, it is critical to recognize the social dimensions of learning and education. This conceptual chapter provides a review of the literature on several global initiatives to shape the futures of education by focusing on resilient open education for all in the context of social justice, human rights, and democracy.

Thesis Eleven ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 145 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-98 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jose Jowel Canuday

In popular imagery, the littorals of Sulu and Zamboanga conjure visions of pirates, terrorists, and bandits marauding its rough seas, open shores, and rugged mountains. These bleak accounts render the region nothing but a violent and peripheral southern Philippine backdoor inconspicuous to the sophisticated constituencies of the world’s metropolitan centres. Obscured from these imageries are the lasting cosmopolitan traits of openness, flexibility, and reception of local folk to trans-local cultural streams that marked Sulu and Zamboanga as a globalised space across the ages and oceans. The distinctive features of these cosmopolitan sensibilities are strikingly discernible in inter-generationally shared narratives, artefacts, and performances that were continually renewed from the days when Sulu and Zamboanga served as a borderless trading and cultural enclave nestled at the crossroads of the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. These enduring cosmopolitan sensibilities are embodied in the blending, among others, of the time-honoured dance of pangalay and the pop-musical dance genre celebrated on actual, analogue, and digitally-mediated spaces of the contemporary world. Furthermore, these embodied sensibilities are evident in song compositions that proclaim the humanistic themes of hope, peace, and prosperity to their place and the world in ways that exemplify the local people’s broader sense of connections beyond the narrow association of family, community, ethnicity, religion, and identity. This mixed bag of age-old and recent imaginaries and cultural traffic evoke a sociality that link the social spaces of the troubled but once and current globalised region to continuing acts of transcendence in history, memory, and visions of the future. In these marginalized places, we can see an unyielding tradition of cultural re-adaptation and creativity made up of myriad everyday acts that are down-to-earth, pragmatic, interstitial, and practical cosmopolitanism.


2021 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-167
Author(s):  
Grzegorz Sokół

The subject of this essay is Andrzej Waśkiewicz’s book Ludzie – rzeczy – ludzie. O porządkach społecznych, gdzie rzeczy łączą, nie dzielą (People–Things–People: On Social Orders Where Things Connect Rather Than Divide People). The book is the work of a historian of ideas and concerns contemporary searches for alternatives to capitalism: the review presents the book’s overview of visions of society in which the market, property, inequality, or profit do not play significant roles. Such visions reach back to Western utopian social and political thought, from Plato to the nineteenth century. In comparing these ideas with contemporary visions of the world of post-capitalism, the author of the book proposes a general typology of such images. Ultimately, in reference to Simmel, he takes a critical stance toward the proposals, recognizing the exchange of goods to be a fundamental and indispensable element of social life. The author of the review raises two issues that came to mind while reading the book. First, the juxtaposition of texts of a very different nature within the uniform category of “utopia” causes us to question the role and status of reflections regarding the future and of speculative theory in contemporary social thought; second, such a juxtaposition suggests that reflecting on the social “optimal good” requires a much more precise and complex conception of a “thing,” for instance, as is proposed by new materialism or anthropological studies of objects and value as such.


Author(s):  
John C. Beachboard

A practitioner leaves behind the world of failed multimillion-dollar information systems projects to seek solutions in academe. In making the transition from IS practitioner to IS researcher, the author encounters two fundamental tensions regarding the conduct of social science. The first tension concerns the challenge of conducting research meeting the criteria of scientific rigor while addressing issues relevant to practitioners. The second tension centers on the debate concerning the suitability of positivist and non-positivist approaches to research in the social sciences. A review of the literature discussing these tensions led the author to the observation that the two tensions appear to be related. This insight led to the investigation of multi-paradigmatic research frameworks as a means of reconciling these related tensions. The essay provides a personalized account regarding the author’s motivation for conducting practitioner-oriented research, the intellectual journey made through the literature to acquire tools of the social science field, and his observations concerning the advantages of multi-paradigmatic research in the IS field.


Through case studies of incidents around the world where the social media platforms have been used and abused for ulterior purposes, Chapter 6 highlights the lessons that can be learned. For good or for ill, the author elaborates on the way social media has been used as an arbiter to inflict various forms of political influence and how we may have become desensitized due to the popularity of the social media platforms themselves. A searching view is provided that there is now a propensity by foreign states to use social media to influence the user base of sovereign countries during key political events. This type of activity now justifies a paradigm shift in relation to our perception and utilization of computerized devices for the future.


Author(s):  
Saul M. Olyan

This chapter discusses the various ways in which violent rites might have an impact on the shaping of social relationships in the world of the biblical text. The author’s primary interest in this chapter is to illuminate how ritual violence might function to terminate, perpetuate, and even create connections between individuals, groups, or polities. Texts examined include 1 Sam 22:12–19, the story of Saul’s mercenary Doeg the Edomite’s execution of the priests of Nob; 2 Sam 10:1–5, the Ammonites’ public humiliation of David’s embassy of comforters; 2 Sam 16:5–13, the cursing, stoning, and dirt casting of Shimi the Benjaminite as David flees Jerusalem before Absalom’s army; 2 Sam 20:1–22, the execution of the rebel Sheba ben Bikri by the inhabitants of Abel Bet Maacah; and Neh 13:25, the account of Nehemiah’s violent, coercive rites targeting his intermarried opponents.


Author(s):  
Christian W. McMillen

There will be more pandemics. A pandemic might come from an old, familiar foe such as influenza or might emerge from a new source—a zoonosis that makes its way into humans, perhaps. The epilogue asks how the world will confront pandemics in the future. It is likely that patterns established long ago will re-emerge. But how will new challenges, like climate change, affect future pandemics and our ability to respond? Will lessons learned from the past help with plans for the future? One thing is clear: in the face of a serious pandemic much of the developing world’s public health infrastructure will be woefully overburdened. This must be addressed.


Author(s):  
Suwithida Charungkaittikul ◽  
John A. Henschke

Today, the world is changing, re-establishing the role of education to have a developed society. This article aims to explore the practical application of Andragogy as a key element for creating a sustainable lifelong learning society, to propose strategies for developing a lifelong learning society using andragogical concepts, to enhance ‘andragogy' as a scientific academic discipline and to expand on the horizon of andragogical assumptions and processes put forth by Malcolm Knowles. The literature on andragogy demonstrates the need to consider the future of andragogy, which may strengthen the theory and allow for the assumptions and processes to further guide this aspect of adult education. While the journey towards a lifelong learning society will continue to evolve, the lessons learned may help to identify key facilitating factors as well as pitfalls to be avoided in formulating more comprehensive lifelong learning society development strategies in the future.


2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 1781 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Bardos ◽  
Hayley Thomas ◽  
Jonathan Smith ◽  
Nicola Harries ◽  
Frank Evans ◽  
...  

Sustainability considerations have become widely recognised in contaminated land management and are now accepted as an important component of remediation planning and implementation around the world. The Sustainable Remediation Forum for the UK (SuRF-UK) published guidance on sustainability criteria for consideration in drawing up (or framing) assessments, organised across 15 “headline” categories, five for the environment element of sustainability, five for the social, and five for the economic. This paper describes how the SuRF-UK indicator guidance was developed, and the rationale behind its structure and approach. It describes its use in remediation option appraisal in the UK, and reviews the international papers that have applied or reviewed it. It then reviews the lessons learned from its initial use and the opinions and findings of international commentators, and concludes with recommendations on how the indicator categories might be further refined in the future. The key findings of this review are that the SuRF-UK framework and indicator guidance is well adopted into practice in the UK. It is widely recognised as the most appropriate mechanism to support sustainability-based decision making in contaminated land decision making. It has influenced the development of other national and international guidance and standards on sustainable remediation. However, there is room for some fine tuning of approach based on the lessons learned during its application.


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