ABSTRACT
A critical issue in education since 2020 has been the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the teaching and learning process. The pandemic has affected all areas of education and foreign language teaching has not been the exception. The study presents key aspects of teacher experience and training in relation to their use of ICT, which has become ubiquitous for teaching and learning during the last two years. For this study, a mixed methodology approach was used with a semi-structured questionnaire that was administered through social networks as well as WhatsApp and emails. A total of 184 responses were recorded from English teachers from all educational levels, public and private schools as well as language institutions. The results showcase that the main aspects affecting the development of classes are teachers' experience using ICT tools, training received, and technology appropriation. Moreover, the availability of a variety of tools for synchronous and asynchronous instruction, communication, and evaluation allowed teachers to rapidly transition into Emergency Remote Teaching. These results inform education stakeholders of the difficulties and opportunities brought by the COVID-19 pandemic.
ABSTRACT
This article investigates some of the implications of intimate design practices by presenting two academic projects carried out within the context of an uncertain present. It argues that design practices have the capacity to foster intimacy and affect through the lens of the politics of care. Drawing on the notion of affective bodies, the authors claim that design can explore new paths to reinvent the everyday, focusing on recent crisis-ridden contexts. The article examines how intimate practices that reformulate everyday politics can reclaim temporality, active citizenship and radical affectivity as infrastructural needs in contemporary urban habitats. The two case studies date from March 2020 through December 2021 under the climate of crisis brought about by the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Western Europe and the ongoing Mediterranean refugee crisis. Given the escalation of the blurring between the private and public spheres, the personal and the political, it is especially relevant to explore intimacy as a means of enacting politically empowered action through design. Both case studies aim to temporarily interrupt conventional uses of collective urban spaces in order to generate pockets of resistance that explore the subliminal potentials of urban spaces and allow us to imagine, and even experience, different ways of living through an updated lens of care. These irruptions of intersubjective appropriations of urban spaces not only have an emblematic impact, but also a cumulative effect by generating a growing network of affective bodies in action. This emergent affective network offers relevant opportunities for the transformation of crisis-ridden urban contexts through dynamic interactions between sociality and spatiality. © 2022, Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Introduction: recent studies have reported the occurrence of thrombotic phenomena or coagulopathy in patients with COVID-19. There are divergent positions regarding the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of these phenomena, and current clinical practice is based solely on deductions by extension from retrospective studies, case series, observational studies, and international guidelines developed prior to the pandemic. Objective: to generate a group of recommendations on the prevention, diagnosis and management of thrombotic complications associated with COVID-19. Methods: a rapid guidance was carried out applying the GRADE Evidence to Decision (EtD) frameworks and an iterative participation system, with statistical and qualitative analysis. Results: 31 clinical recommendations were generated focused on: a) Coagulation tests in symptomatic adults with suspected infection or confirmed SARS CoV-2 infection;b) Thromboprophylaxis in adults diagnosed with COVID-19 (Risk scales, thromboprophylaxis for outpatient, in-hospital management, and duration of thromboprophylaxis after discharge from hospitalization), c) Diagnosis and treatment of thrombotic complications, and d) Management of people with previous indication of anticoagulant agents. Conclusions: recommendations of this consensus guide clinical decision-making regarding the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of thrombotic phenomena in patients with COVID-19, and represent an agreement that will help decrease the dispersion in clinical practices according to the challenge imposed by the pandemic.