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AUTHOR(S) Annemie Grobler
AUTHOR(S) S. Rathikaa; C. S. Nivedha
AUTHOR(S) Gabrielle Oliveira; Marisa Segel
AUTHOR(S) Karin Paola Meyrer; Dorotea Frank Kersch
AUTHOR(S) Maria Chalari; Marios Vryonides
This paper focuses on adolescents’ reading habits during the protracted lockdown (March 2020 - May 2021) due to COVID-19. Drawing on evidence from an online survey, several focus groups and semi-structured interviews with adolescents in Greece and Cyprus during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper explores the extent to which reading books is still highly valued in adolescents’ lives and the degree to which this activity is related to adolescents’ advantageous familial and socio-economic background. Moreover, the paper examines whether reading should still be considered an activity that contributes to cultural reproduction in the digital era. This paper contributes to the examination of the often invisible mechanisms that originate from the family and produce socially stratified school underachievement that sustains social inequalities in contemporary Greek and Cypriot societies.
AUTHOR(S) Sayibu Abdul Badi
AUTHOR(S) Nicole Dulieu; Silvia Arlini; Mya Gordon
AUTHOR(S) Nicola Jones; Kate Pincock; Silvia Guglielmi (et al.)
The Youth As Researchers (YAR) initiative is a youth development programme, designed to ensure, support, and advance youth voices. It provides training and mentoring that supports youth to design and conduct social research, with a view to informing policy-making, programme design and future research.The initiative was first conceived by the UNESCO Chair on Children, Youth and Civic Engagement (Ireland), as a model to engage vulnerable youth in re-designing their own futures. It is premised on the belief that no-one knows better than young people themselves about their problems, and the solutions that will work for them. It gained traction in the current context, as UNESCO’s Member States are looking for innovative ways to address the challenges youth are facing. In engaging with the Social and Human Science Sector, and with UNESCO’s field offices, the youth-led research agenda delivered a strong message on the need to underpin policy decisions with scientific facts, and to ensure civil society is consulted on the issues at hand.
The aim of this case study is to present information on national or government-led distance learning programmes in response to the disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. It is hoped that this will enable reflection on the policy responses and their effectiveness in minimizing disruption and learning loss, enabling the continuity and quality of learning, and maintaining inclusion and equity.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted education for approximately 1.2 billion students across the Asia-Pacific, and forced the closure of many schools, precipitating a transition towards remote learning, albeit with uneven access and quality, and threatening to deepen the ‘learning crisis’ that already existed, particularly for the most vulnerable learners. As education systems in the Asia-Pacific seek to recover the learning loss due to the pandemic and address the broader learning crisis, it is incumbent on governments to identify appropriate recovery strategies in the short term. Also, governments need to support education system transformation so that all learners reach minimum proficiency in numeracy and literacy and acquire competencies needed to fulfil their potential –personal, social and economic. Learning recovery strategies will differ across the region, not the least because schools were fully or partially closed1for different lengths of time -for example, India (82 weeks), Indonesia (77 weeks), and Bangladesh (73 weeks). Other countries saw shorter closures, such as: Vanuatu (4 weeks), Papua New Guinea (6 weeks), and the Solomon Islands (7 weeks).
Teachers are the most important actors in improving students’ learning outcomes and thus in addressing a learning crisis in the region. Moreover, the unprecedented and extensive school closures caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have affected about 43 million teachers in school education in the Asia-Pacific region. These teachers were at risk of losing their jobs due to budget cuts, they had to address the new challenge of teaching remotely, as well as worrying about their own and their families’ health and well-being. Throughout the school closures, teachers continued to teach under extremely fluid and trying conditions: increased workloads, having to use new and unfamiliar technologies without adequate training, experiencing a lack of materials for online instruction, high levels of physical and mental stress, and insufficient support.
On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. In response, governments around the world took the unprecedented step of closing all schools as a way to curb the spread of the COVID-19 virus. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that school closures impacted almost 1.6 billion learners across 169 countries. Most children in this study experienced school closures, or partial or temporary re-openings, well into 2022. Education systems had very unequal capacities to respond to school closures with remote learning and support to children and families. The most common format remote learning took was online learning (91 per cent), yet 1.3 billion of the 1.6 billion students out of school had no internet connection at home—let alone a device to learn on—and internet literacy was extremely low among students, teachers, and parents.10 Moreover, the majority of the estimated 300 million learners with online access were in high- or middle-income countries. Children in humanitarian settings were among the least likely to be able to access digital education. This digital divide exacerbated education inequalities everywhere. In low-income and humanitarian settings, school closures also amplified the pre-existing learning and school access crisis and cut children off from the protective services schools often provide.
UNICEF Innocenti's Children and COVID-19 Library is a database collecting research from around the world on COVID-19 and its impacts on children and adolescents.
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