ABSTRACT
Background: Universities across the world experienced lockdown and closure of all learning institutions around March 2020 because of the advent of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). This lockdown and closure presented challenges to the traditional pedagogical approaches in the health sciences, which typically include both campus-based and clinical site-focused activities involving face-to-face interactions and work integrated learning. The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a shift to emergency remote teaching (ERT) and learning. Objectives: This study aimed to explore speech–language pathology (SLP) educators’ experiences of the planning and implementation of ERT and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: A qualitative, descriptive narrative design was adopted to meet the objectives of the study. Seven SLP educators from a single university in South Africa participated in this study by constructing narratives on their experiences. The narratives were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Five themes emerged from the data analysis, and these included (1) uncertainty, (2) educator feelings, (3) capacity development, (4) influence of circumstances on teaching, learning and assessment and (5) troubleshooting. Current findings provide insight into the challenges encountered and strategies utilised by educators in planning and implementing ERT and learning. Conclusion: Beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, most educators believe that a hybrid model would address some concerns identified, such as that of missing face-to-face contact, but that it would still allow for the full exploitation of online activities for teaching, learning and assessment required during clinical training. © 2022. The Authors. Licensee: AOSIS.
ABSTRACT
The COVID-19 pandemic and its control measures had a devastating impact on household food security in South Africa. The pandemic brought existing food injustice patterns, such as spatial inequality, intersectionality, and the causes of food poverty to the forefront, especially for women. It also galvanized momentum in the people's agenda for solidarity and stimulated community members' calls for an overhaul of the existing commercialized food system toward hyper-localized, community-led solutions such as food dialogs and community kitchens. First and foremost, that meant talking about hunger and addressing its root causes. This paper reports on a co-research process on household food security during the pandemic in four neighborhoods of the Cape Flats. This study found that household food insecurity and the roles women play in food systems are significantly shaped by intersectionality: the consequences of being women, Black or Persons of Color, residents of geographies of social and economic marginalization within the city, and historically excluded from higher education. In this paper, we provide reflections on the co-research process from the perspectives of co-researchers, the project coordinator, and the project funder by applying a critical feminist framework and by answering the question: How can critical feminist research steer community-led action? Community members from the Cape Flats and five post-graduate students from a Berlin-based institute conceptualized this study and it was implemented by community researchers and projects partners in 2020. The paper highlights important aspects of the methodology, particularly the joint contextualization and sense making of findings by community researchers who placed food insecurity results in the context of their lived experiences. Based on their discussions, the co-researchers created visions for post-COVID-19 food environments, one of which is discussed in this paper: destigmatization of hunger. Hunger was described by co-researchers as a problem hidden by individuals and silenced by communities.