Style, Meaning and Pedagogy

Rachid Acim, Ibn Zohr University, Agadir, Morocco

Global Perspectives on Online Education During a Time of Emergency: Conditions, Contexts and Critiques

Edited by Patricia Marybelle Davies

‘Global Perspectives on Online Education During a Time of Emergency’ presents viewpoints on the unprecedented shift to online education as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. It aims to broaden and deepen readers’ understanding of studies that could better address academic issues related to teaching and learning online. The pandemic triggered the disruption of national educational systems and a rapid transition to online education, but there were few guidelines on how to proceed. Consequently, the role of educational technologies and distinctions between formal and informal learning became blurred (Greenhow & Lewin, 2016). This volume examines how educators adopted new pedagogical practices, adapted to flexible working environments, and tackled new technologies to maintain educational systems following the global outbreak of the coronavirus. It showcases innovative practices and critiques several learning theories of online education. The chapters are developed using two main approaches: empirical investigations and reviews of existing research. The empirical chapters present significant new findings of broad relevance. The review chapters use established studies to describe recent developments of broad significance and highlight unresolved questions and future directions. The volume, as a whole, provides research-based insights on evidence on the contexts and conditions of the emergency transition to online education worldwide and useful recommendations on emergent directions in online education. This is a vital text for educational researchers, technologists, and practitioners. It includes empirical data, theoretical questions, and methodological approaches addressing online education. The volume explores flexible learning, alternative pedagogical practices, and changes in digital environments, examining futuristic approaches at a crucial moment of global reform in online education.

Untangling Whiteness: Education, Resistance and Transformation

Jennifer Gale de Saxe, Victoria University of Wellington

With the prominence of workshops, trainings, and anti-racist books popping up over the past few years, it may seem confusing as to what it really means to engage in deliberate and meaningful learning that challenges the many facets of racism and whiteness. 'Untangling Whiteness' directly interrogates the assumption that the teaching and learning about race and whiteness, particularly within the university context, can be condensed to one course, one workshop, or even a few trainings. It is a life-long process that may begin in one university classroom, but must continue as part of who we are as unfinished and undetermined beings. Through a deep and multi-faceted interrogation of racism and white supremacy, this book untangles critical theories of race, whiteness and resistance in an accessible and dialogical manner. It also situates whiteness in Aotearoa, New Zealand, demonstrating the importance of context and location when working to undermine and challenge it. As a theoretical provocation of existing scholarship on race and white supremacy, 'Untangling Whiteness' is underpinned by educating for critical consciousness, as well as a phenomenological engagement that aims to both interpret the world differently and transform it.

The American Idea, Resilience, and Thrivancy Education

Dexter Chapin

This book is about a path forward, creating cultural resilience so rising generations of Americans can thrive. In 1995, William Strauss and Neil Howe predicted that by 2025, America would be in crisis. It has arrived on schedule. Do we have, or can we develop, the cultural resilience to navigate the crisis, protect and maintain the American Idea, and come out the other side in a better place than we are now? Our resilience depends on the number of alternative paradigms we have available to us, fewer paradigms, less resilience. For fifty years, there has been a dominant, white male, cultural paradigm, driving others to the margins, and slowly devolving into an ideology. Ideologies truncate resilience and preclude Thrivancy. How did we get here and how do we get out?

THAWZEN Moments: Autoethnographic piano teaching and learning stories

Jeeyeon Ryu, Yorkville University

THAWZEN Moments: Autoethnographic Piano Teaching and Learning Stories is a collection of 46 vignettes, digitally edited photographs, poems, and reflective-reflexive narratives about children’s imaginative, creative, and magical lifeworlds of exploring music and piano playing. There are many ways of learning to play the piano, THAWZEN different ways of re/imagining music. There are many stories to share with you, never-ending questions to explore together. The stories included in this book are our happy piano play, our shared musical journeys in re/creating more meaningful and joyful piano teaching and learning experiences.