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The Impact of COVID-19 Laws, Policies, and Practices on Educational Equity  

Nate Hutcherson, Sergio D. Barragán, Shadman Islem, and Raquel Muñiz

K–12 education and higher education in the United States were drastically affected by COVID-19. Local, state, and federal leaders’ decisions in response to the pandemic were meant to protect the health of their communities. These decisions included school closures across the country, vaccine mandates in some states, and bans on vaccine mandates in other states. Additionally, educational institutions made adaptations to education that resulted in widespread differences in students’ educational environments. These adaptations included remote learning in the K–12 and higher education contexts, changes to student support services, and changes in standardized testing requirements for higher education admissions applications. The result of these decisions and adaptations were educational laws, policies, and practices that were not equally enjoyed and experienced by all students but rather further exacerbated preexisting educational disparities. Marginalized students, including low-income individuals, students of color, first-generation students, and English Learners, already faced significant barriers to fully engage in their education prepandemic. The inequities of pandemic responses only served to further entrench these disadvantages. These efforts raise important considerations for future research, policy, and practice that can curb the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and future crises.

Article

Policies, Educational Reforms, and the Everyday Making of School in Argentina  

Silvia Grinberg

School reform in Argentina has undergone major changes as a result of two structural transformations of the educational system in the last 40 years. There have been, and continue to be, multiple lines of action involving laws, programs, and policies that affect every aspect of school life. Layers of reform play out in the everyday life of schools, both as lofty statements about education and as large and small everyday acts. Despite disgruntled demands, nostalgia, and counter-reforms, it is crucial to pay attention to the everyday making of an institution, a making that takes place in the muck of history. Each of the programs, policies, regulations, and laws is engraved in this muck as a kind of sediment in a palimpsest-like mechanism where traces of the previous reform remain. These reforms, especially their impact on the life of institutions, remain a black box. The key to a different way of conceiving educational policy and reform lies in the everyday and in listening carefully to events as mundane as they are outlandish. It is a matter of patching things together in the everyday making of schools and their actors, which is marked by crisis, fragility, and precariousness.

Article

Teaching Climate Justice Education Holistically in Schools  

Robert B. Stevenson, Hilary Whitehouse, and Ellen Field

Climate change education in schools has shifted over the last decade from being given little or no attention, to being narrowly confined to science and geographical education, and to receiving increased attention across the globe within educational policy, curriculum design, teaching practice, and research endeavors. The growing calls for more expansive climate change education internationally respond to the “unprecedented” experiences of record heat, cold, fire, drought, famine, and flood that are now commonly lived and intensely felt across the globe, making climate change an urgent, disruptive, and embodied phenomenon. We previously described climate change education as “learning in the face of risk, uncertainty and rapid change.” Unfortunately, the risks have intensified to a full-blown crisis. The year 2023 was the hottest year on record. Within the timeframe of this publication, the Paris Agreement guardrail of 1.5°C will likely be exceeded. Young people are unlikely to experience a stable, Holocene-type atmosphere in their lifetimes. Today’s youth are acutely aware they will bear the most significant impacts of the climate crisis and will be responsible for extensive climate mitigation and adaptation, especially in the face of the limited actions of governments and corporations to substantially reduce carbon emissions. This reality exposes the intergenerational injustice of the rapidly changing climate, but it also exposes other injustices owing to economic inequalities within countries and between developed and developing countries, as well as across geographic locations that are more affected by sea-level rises, extreme heat, or climate extremes that disrupt economic livelihoods and well-being. As a result of the recognition of these injustices, there has been an increasing shift in the nomenclature in research literature as well as in youth climate movements and projects, from climate change education to a more holistic idea of climate justice education. Both research and youth climate movements have drawn attention to the importance of education encompassing matters of intergenerational, sociocultural, economic, and political justice as well as confronting the emotional issues generated by the threats and occurrence of climate disasters. Many conceptions of climate justice education embrace the cognitive, affective, behavioral, and civic action domains of learning. For young people and their teachers in formal education, collective student engagement is of prime importance. The most effective scale for taking action for climate mitigation, resilience, and adaptation is recognized at the community level. Schools are places and spaces for materially positive learning actions within communities and, as such, powerful places to drive local action. Although climate disruption is a peril at the global scale, effective climate education and action tends to be at the local scale.

Article

Literacies in India  

Radha Iyer

Literacy, defined as the ability to read and write, has had a long history in India; while the oral tradition existed for centuries, writing was introduced in the later Vedic period. The colonial period brought about mass education, English as the medium of instruction, and textbook-oriented literacy that led to the disintegration of the Indigenous education system. Postindependence concerted efforts have been undertaken to improve literacy for all age groups. Currently, various schemes and programs are reflective of the nation’s aim to be fully literate. Nevertheless, the objective has been deterred by caste, class, and poverty. Universalization of education, the Total Literacy Campaign, and the Right to Education have been significant aspects of five year plans since their inception in 1951 until the last five year plan that ended in 2017; these have ensured that literacy rates progressed from 12% to 75% in the past 70 years of independence. Despite these worthwhile steps and progress, universal literacy in India is a long-awaited aim.

Article

Symbiosis of Teacher Leadership and Professional Learning Communities  

Tengku Faekah Tengku Ariffin, Mohammad Noman, and Yusoff Mohd Suhaili

The professional learning community (PLC) has established itself as a form of teacher professional development embedded in the work of teachers. Although it has been discussed in the literature for a considerable period of time, the concept has not been delivered in practice effectively enough to be widely accepted as a significant contributor to teacher leadership and development. The need for the proper enhancement of PLC practices is thus justified in the increasingly challenging world of the teaching profession. Teacher leadership can play an essential role in strengthening PLC implementation in the school setting. When teacher leaders play their roles in the PLC setting, they are able to drive PLC and help other teachers improve their instruction and bring about changes in student achievements. PLC is instrumental in developing teacher leadership within the schools. Teachers who are informally regarded as mentors and guide others voluntarily will develop a sense of efficacy and confidence. These teachers are leaders in the making. Because PLC and teacher leadership exist in a symbiotic relationship wherein both support each other, schools need to remove hurdles from implementing PLC and teacher leadership and support their mutual development.

Article

Translanguaging and EFL Teaching  

Zhongfeng Tian and Wei Li

Translanguaging is the capacity multilingual language users have to draw on different linguistic, cognitive, semiotic, and modal resources to make meaning and make sense, transcending the boundaries between named languages and between language and other meaning- and sense-making resources. The 21st century is a postmultilingualism era that is no longer about the harmonious parallel existence of multiple languages but about the infiltration, transgression, and subversion of boundaries that are artificially and ideologically set between languages, races, and nations. No single nation or community can claim sole ownership, authority, and responsibility for any particular language, including English, and boundaries between named languages, between languages and other communicative means, and the relationship between language and the nation-state are being constantly reassessed, broken, or adjusted. Translanguaging captures such changing dynamics and highlights the language user’s agency in exploiting their communicative repertoire holistically and in an integrated and coordinated way. When applied to English as a foreign language (EFL) teaching and learning, translanguaging demands that not just the first language but the learner’s repertoire be visible and audible in the classroom, aiming to foster a more inclusive, equitable learning environment, especially for minoritized language speakers. Translanguaging as a pedagogical approach has been shown to deepen students’ understanding of certain content and topics, facilitate the learners’ participation and knowledge coconstruction with one another, develop their English language and literacy skills, and enhance their multilingual and multicultural awareness.

Article

The Mnemonic Effects of Retrieval Practice  

Cristina D. Zepeda, Emily Een, and Andrew C. Butler

Retrieval practice refers to the act of retrieving information from memory with the intent to promote learning. Although retrieval practice is often operationalized as taking a test, it can occur through many different types of learning activities (e.g., answering a question posed by a teacher, working on a practice problem, writing an essay, using flashcards, having a group discussion). Research on retrieval practice has a long history, but there has been a surge of interest since 2005 in the phenomenon. This large body of research has shown that retrieval practice produces superior long-term retention and transfer of learning to new contexts relative to activities that are predominantly used to study material (e.g., listening to a lecture, reading a textbook, watching a video)—a finding that is commonly referred to as “the testing effect.” Importantly, it is the act of retrieving that causes learning; such direct effects of retrieval practice can be distinguished from its indirect effects on learning. These indirect effects include: providing formative feedback to the learner, incentivizing study, and reducing test anxiety. Research has also identified several factors that moderate the effects of retrieval practice, including experimental design, test format, provision of feedback, and retention interval. In addition, there is ample evidence to support the conclusion that the benefits of retrieval practice are highly generalizable across learner populations, materials and skills, settings, and outcome measures. Given that the mnemonic benefits of retrieval practice are robust and generalize broadly, it is widely recommended as a learning strategy for students and a pedagogical technique for educators.

Article

Multiliteracies in Professional Education  

Kathryn Hibbert, Mary Ott, Christopher Eaton, and Lin Sun

Multiliteracies theory is part of a growing and evolving body of research tangled up with multiple, intersecting fields: literacies, technologies, pedagogies, socio-materiality, and semiotics, to name a few. It is a theory that has been taken up largely in the professional practice of teacher education but is rapidly emerging as a useful way to think through the complexities of practice in multiple professions such as medical education, or engineering. As learning has come to be understood and framed in ways that acknowledge the temporal, spatial, material, and embodied layers of understanding, practice-based professions are finding ways to investigate and support knowing in practice.

Article

Representing Masculinities in Children’s Literature Series  

Troy Potter

Children’s literature operates as discursive social structures that establish young readers’ understanding of gender, including masculinities. Oftentimes, however, children’s literature perpetuates limited or normative constructions of gender. This is particularly the case for two genres that are popular with male readers: fantasy and comedy. Both genres for young readers contribute to the maintenance of a hegemony of masculinity that values independence, action, resourcefulness, and bravery.While some fantasy and comedy series for young readers begin to expand the repertoire of acceptable masculine traits by incorporating empathy and consideration of others, validating more sensitive models of masculinity, they do not necessarily undermine the hierarchy seemingly inherent to masculine dynamics. By understanding the complex and sometimes contradictory messages about masculinity that are presented in books for young people, educators can develop critical ways of reading fiction to engage children in meaningful conversations about gendered identities in order to promote acceptance and understanding of all genders and differences, not just those relating to masculinities.

Article

Social Justice and Equitable Systems in Education  

Romina Madrid Miranda and Christopher Chapman

Social Justice is a term that encapsulates many of the problematic issues concerning modern societies. As a reflection of society, the concept has evolved to emphasize different aspects of fairness such as distribution or recognition. One often tacit but central element in this discussion is the articulation of social justice with the development of equitable education systems. In other words, what it means to pursue social justice in educational change and improvement. To address this question, contemporary ideas of social justice can be brought into the field of educational change and improvement in a more intentional and explicit way to respond to the societal imperatives for justice in education. By tracing the evolution of the key conceptualizations of social justice rooted in political philosophy, it is possible to examine its implications for educational and systemic transformation. Furthermore, from a systems perspective, understanding the ecology of equity can offer important insights into the interplay between schools, education systems, and wider society. The exploration of experiences and approaches in education that aim to disrupt inequities can be used to propose a number of key principles to guide educational change efforts from a social justice perspective, aiming to foster more equitable educational systems. These principles serve to unpack issues of social justice and move to a more complex and action-oriented perspective that places distribution, recognition, and representation as key to developing more equitable education systems. The six principles are: a focus on learning and teaching; a commitment to collaboration and networking; the use of inquiry, research, and evidence; understanding the contextual nature of justice; investing in support and agency; and building leadership capacity. The notion of a networked learning system and how this perspective can advance the discourse toward a more explicit agenda for developing socially just approaches in educational research, policymaking, and practice is also helpful. The overarching goal is to stimulate dialogue and action aimed at creating more equitable educational systems that prioritize social justice principles in all facets of education.