COVID-19 era healthcare ethics education: Cultivating educational and moral resilience

The COVID-19 pandemic crisis has had profound effects on global health, healthcare, and public health policy. It has also impacted education. Within undergraduate healthcare education of doctors, nurses, and allied professions, rapid shifts to distance learning and pedagogic content creation within new realities, demands of healthcare practice settings, shortened curricula, and/or earlier graduation have also challenged ethics teaching in terms of curriculum allotments or content specification. We propose expanding the notion of resilience to the field of ethics education under the conditions of remote learning. Educational resilience starts in the virtual classroom of ethics teaching, initially constituted as an “unpurposed space” of exchange about the pandemic’s challenging impact on students and educators. This continuously transforms into “purposed space” of reflection, discovering ethics as a repertory of orientative knowledge for addressing the pandemic’s challenges on personal, professional, societal, and global levels and for discovering (and then addressing) that the health of individuals and populations also has moral determinants. As such, an educational resilience framework with inherent adaptability rises to the challenge of supporting the moral agency of students acting both as professionals and as global citizens. Educational resilience is key in supporting and sustaining professional identify formation and facilitating the development of students’ moral resilience and leadership amid moral complexity and potential moral transgression—not only but especially in times of pandemic.

“Traditions Are Not for Me”: Curriculum, Alternative Schools, and Formerly Incarcerated Young Black Men’s Academic Success

Literature suggests that culturally promotive curricula can counter the effect of anti-Blackness in United States (U.S.) schools by cultivating Black students’ cultural, social, and academic development and fostering learning environments in which they feel respected, connected, and invested in their school communities. However, Black students, especially young Black men, who return to school following a period of incarceration, face discrimination and numerous barriers to school reentry and engagement. While some enroll in alternative schools as a last option to earn a diploma, little is known about how curricula in these educational settings can facilitate positive school reentry experiences and outcomes among this population. As such, this intrinsic qualitative case study explored how one alternative school’s culturally promotive curriculum fosters and cultivates educational resilience among formerly incarcerated young Black men. Data collection included observations, interviews, and document reviews, and utilized a thematic analytic approach that included grounded theory techniques. Results indicate that teaching content that formerly incarcerated young Black men perceived as truthful and relevant to their lived experiences augmented their school engagement. The young men reported feeling empowered by the school’s curriculum structure and culture that allowed them to self-direct learning goals and course content toward themes that affirmed their cultural and social identities. The curriculum also appeared to facilitate positive relationships with the instructors, leading to the development of a positive school climate where the young men felt safe, appreciated, and supported. These findings highlight the important role space, place, and relationships can play in bolstering formerly incarcerated young Black men’s educational resilience through a culturally promotive curriculum in the context of an alternative school.

Building Educational Resilience Through Transnational Mobility Trajectories: Young People Between Ghana and The Netherlands

Trips by migrant youth to their origin country are seen by institutional actors such as teachers and social workers as disrupting youth’s educational progress, and some European countries have financial and legal consequences when these trips take place during the school year. We follow Ghanaian youth living in The Netherlands on their journeys to Ghana and study how they experience such trips and are affected by them. Trips allow young people to reconnect with family and old friends, recollect memories, and confront them with poverty in their country of origin, making them resilient and motivated when facing adversities in school in the Netherlands. This study investigates how young Ghanaians’ mobility between Ghana and The Netherlands relates to their educational resilience. Based on 20 months of multi-sited ethnographic research following 30 youths of 16–25 age group, we deploy a socio-ecological approach developed in social psychology to identify three resilience-building mechanisms: connection to motivational others, active recollection and comparative confrontation. These mechanisms have to date remained outside of the purview of resilience research and research on migration and education, as these fields focus on the nation-state rather than the transnational context in which young people operate. They thereby ignore mobility patterns that make other contexts relevant to young people’s educational resilience. As such, we expand the socio-ecological model of resilience to include transnational elements and show how mobility can positively relate to education and the resilience of migrant youth.

THE REORGANIZATION OF THE FAMILY SYSTEM AT THE TIME OF COVID-19: EDUCATIONAL RESILIENCE AND ASSISTIVE TECHNOLOGIES

In the life cycle of family systems, transition periods are important stages for the maturation of the individual and his family as it allows the reorganization of relational arrangements. The health emergency of recent months makes it necessary for us to reflect on resilience education, to cultivate more authentic educational relationships and to react to stressful and problematic situations with greater self-effectiveness. If rigid family systems risk of causing communicative and relational diseases, investing in emotional literacy and empathy means providing adults and children with the tools to deal with the painful situations, that are inevitably part of everyday life, to share negative experiences and bring out the inner resources. In this perspective, technologies play a significant role in the media, both because they are a bridge between the family context and the external social network, and because they potentially allow more inclusive and flexible learning-teaching processes. A meticulous analysis of assistive technologies is thus necessary in order to call for a reconfiguration of information flows, spatial-temporal arrangements, methodologies and tools that are to be reconfigured ad habitus of the new individual and social educational needs. Keywords: assistive technologies, educational resilience, emotional literacy, family system, health emergency, psychotherapy.