Walking the Walk: Democratizing Change in Teacher Education

In this essay, as a group of teacher educators, we discuss our experience of “walking the walk” of teacher education transformation at a time of urgent change. We reflect upon our process of integrating three key priorities in our preservice teacher education courses: education for sustainability; trauma-informed practice; and Indigenizing curriculum. Specifically, we reflect on how these processes were adapted according to the needs of individual courses and units, while at the same time making space for our strengths and our “unlearnings” as academics, and for the ethical considerations that troubled us. In this essay, we explore walking the walk of change and integrating social, environmental, and cultural justice principles in our work together toward equipping and enabling new teachers to be themselves agents of change.

The Corporal-oriented approach to Education: a Turn towards the Whole Person

Recent anthropological studies consider the corporal experience as an indispensable attribute of a person’s life world. They declare to go beyond the dichotomy of body and mind and present a modern person as a complex integrity of all systems and characteristics of a living organism. Body and mind are a union of vitality with different forms of their manifestation. The corporal is not regarded as an essential complement to the mental, the corporal is the mental, just in a different form of its manifestation. The implementation of a methodological turn from a rationalcognitive approach to a holistic understanding of human nature and the peculiarities of cognitive processes outlines the problem of education transformation in both theoretical and practical terms. Taking into account the complexity and multiplicity of tasks in solving this problem, the guideline in defining conceptual ideas is the understanding of a person as a multi-temporal being who lives simultaneously in multiple hierarchical levels, ontological time and the scale of processes. It is a question of necessity to construct educational activity in semantic planes: mindbody- culture, mind-body-activity, body-consciousness-reaction and others.

Learning Foreign Languages in a Digital Environment: Learners’ Perception of the Sudden Transition to e-Learning During COVID-19 Lockdown

The research is devoted to the study of the forced and accelerated transition of education to an online environment on the example of learning a foreign language. Despite a large number of studies on e-learning, this study is one of the newest investigating recent education transformation trends. The ultimate goal of this paper was to study changes in students’ assessments of the e-learning process, participation in online-based education, and academic success during the transition to virtual training. The study involved 600 students from 5 private specialized educational institutions located in Moscow (Russian Federation) who were forced to switch to e-learning during the lockdown. The examination was conducted by means of a survey assessing the usefulness, comfort, and acceptability of e-learning in three isolated questions formulated by the authors and measured on a five-point Likert scale. The comparison of its outcomes with the results of objective knowledge tests at the beginning and at the end of the three-month e-learning period revealed the following outcomes. First of all, a decrease in the assessment of the acceptability of continuing e-learning for both genders was noted. According to female respondents, the assessment of the comfort of e-learning decreased significantly (from 3.70 to 3.14 points). In the meantime, the usefulness score dropped notably for both male and female research participants (from 4.10 to 2.98 and from 3.80 to 2.26, respectively). Similar changes were found in four age categories ranging from 20 to 42 years old. Thus, the participants over 30 demonstrated lower final scores. Academic success also decreased in the group of men compared to the group of women. The findings of this study can be practically applied for the further transformation of educational programs and additional preparation of educators with the aim of facilitating learning transition to an online mode. Future research on the topic can be conducted in other regions of the world to obtain more comparative data and investigate different learners’ perceptions.

The Role of STEM Program Directors in Broadening the Impact of STEM Interventions

STEM transformation has been a longstanding goal for higher education institutions who not only wish to maintain global economic competitiveness but most recently have also aimed efforts at achieving STEM equity. While researchers have typically looked to students’ and faculty’s experiences for answers, STEM program directors possess great insight from working closely with students in both faculty and administrative roles. This study explores the views of 45 STEM program directors at 10 institutions across the U.S. that had high STEM bachelor’s degree-completion rates relative to similarly resourced institutions. We document the lessons and strategies that STEM program directors have used to broaden institutional impact, including demonstrating their program’s efficacy through assessments and evaluations, coordinating, and streamlining efforts to ensure program efficiency and longevity, incentivizing support for labor, and consolidating support from institutional leaders. We also disentangle the roles STEM program directors play as grassroots leaders or institutional agents, distinguishing them by their authority and decision-making power and by whether they work to transform the institution to better serve students or to transform students’ behaviors to adapt to the institution. Our findings provide avenues to leverage STEM program directors’ efforts in order to move toward STEM education transformation in higher education.

Be a Good Listener — Exploration of Education Transformation Strategies for Left-behind Children

The education of left-behind children is an important issue in the development of education at present. The emergence of left-behind children is caused by economic transformation and social development. Rural people have always be willing to change their living conditions and improve their living standards, so the parents of rural children have to leave their hometown and come to the city to find a better chance to make a living, but some rural parents are still engaged in the rural orchards, small workshops and other self-employed business. Whether migrant workers or start a small business, or stay in the countryside to operate small business, child's education is bound to be affected to some extent, as a result, the vast majority of the seventy percent of the rural parents wish their children to be looked after by old people, and the parents are not at home for a long time, so they can't take care of the children in learning and life. As a compulsory education worker, we should understand the characteristics of left-behind children and carry out an analysis and research on the education of left-behind children.

Visual Literacy in the Context of Digital Education Transformation

The evolution of digital technologies and the use of visual media in our everyday life highlights the necessity to educate visually literate individuals. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2018) has launched the Future of Education and Skills 2030 that emphasizes that due to the digitalization into all areas of life, digital and data literacy are considered to be core foundations and being literate in this context requires the ability to comprehend, interpret, use and create textual and visual information in various formats, contexts and for diverse purposes (making meaning based on encoding and decoding signs/sign systems). The concept of visual literacy has been studied for several decades, however, it is a relatively new study area within a digital environment in Latvian media and education context. By bringing attention to the practice and reporting students comprehension and competency within the domain of digital visual literacy, the author reports the findings of a study that examined the competence of the sub-domain of visual literacy, applying Inquiry Graphic (IG) as a framework for the analysis. The purpose of this paper is to contribute quantitative and qualitative data to the domain of visual literacy amongst the Riga Art and Media school final year students and conceptualize visual literacy in the process of digital education transformation, proposing further research on academic practice and pedagogical tools to improve a person’s visual literacy and visual media competence in a digital environment.

Revitalizing Educations to Realize a New Business Platform in Indonesia

Abstract—Companies must build new business models and platforms to survive in an uncertain business climate, economic disruption wave, and the COVID-19 pandemic. As the anticipation of all ecosystems changes, companies need superior human resources, actively carry out corporate transformation programs, and implement good corporate governance values to avoid moral hazards and a greater risk of failure. Revitalization of education, supported by corporate universities, workshops, internships, and comparative studies, can produce superior human resources and realize new business platforms in Indonesia. This qualitative research relies on data triangulation to interpret the phenomenon of link and match. Keywords: revitalization, business platform, education, transformation, human resources Abstrak—Kebutuhan membangun model dan platform bisnis baru perusahaan bertahan dalam iklim bisnis yang tidak menentu, gelombang gangguan ekonomi, dan pandemi COVID-19. Sebagai antisipasi segala perubahan ekosistem, perusahaan membutuhkan sumber daya manusia yang unggul, aktif melaksanakan program transformasi perusahaan, dan menerapkan nilai-nilai tata kelola perusahaan yang baik untuk menghindari moral hazard dan risiko kegagalan yang lebih besar. Revitalisasi pendidikan yang didukung oleh corporate university, workshop, magang, dan studi banding, dapat menghasilkan sumber daya manusia yang unggul dan mewujudkan platform bisnis baru di Indonesia. Penelitian kualitatif ini bertumpu pada triangulasi data untuk menginterpretasikan fenomena link and match. Kata kunci: revitalisasi, platform bisnis, pendidikan, transformasi, sumber daya manusia