Connection and alienation during the COVID‐19 pandemic: The narratives of four engineering students

Background Purpose Design/Method Results Conclusions The COVID‐19 pandemic has highlighted, exacerbated, and caused many challenges within engineering education. At the same time, the pandemic provided opportunities for engineering educators to learn from forced change to promote strategic efforts to improve classroom engagement and connection to better support engineering students.We leveraged students' stories to discuss ways university administrators, faculty, and instructors can better support their students during times of global crisis and beyond the current pandemic.We conducted longitudinal narrative interviews with four White women engineering students from different universities in their third and fourth years. The students were selected from a larger research project because their rich and reflective stories resonated with other participant narratives, the research team, and ongoing conversations about educating during and after the COVID‐19 pandemic. Through narrative inquiry, we constructed "restoryed” vignettes and identified patterns within the four students' distinctive stories by drawing on a theoretical framework designed to examine connection and alienation.The findings provided insights into how students were stressed and disconnected from their education in undesirable ways. The findings also provide insight into how those same students received support and maintained a connection to their institution, advisors, and instructors that educators could emulate.Our theoretical framework of connection and alienation proved helpful for understanding the experiences of four engineering students. Additionally, these stories provide practical examples of how faculty and staff can support student connections beyond the pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Journal of Engineering Education is the property of Wiley-Blackwell and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Gender roles, parenthood, and the ethics of care in pandemic media narratives pre- and post-Covid-19

Crises have always brought along transformations in gender identities, roles, and relations: while much has changed in Western culture regarding the role of women and notions of masculinity are also challenged, efforts to control female roles, bodies, and sexualities persist. For example, Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream has described the post-9/11 age as an era of reconstituted "traditional” manhood, redomesticated femininity and nuclear family "togetherness.” The question that lies at the basis of this paper is whether–and if so, how –science fiction cinema continues to respond to moments of crisis and vulnerability through the old myth of protective manhood and feminine weakness. By identifying two cases of insecurity–climate change and the coronavirus pandemic–we analyse a recent film (Bird Box, 2018) and two TV series on pandemic outbreaks from the US (Sweet Tooth, 2021) and Italy (Anna, 2021). All three works break new ground–though not devoid of limits–about family structures and parental care: while Bird Box proposes a reversal of gender roles, Anna elaborates on the notion of motherhood by presenting unconventional models of mothering;in Sweet Tooth, the ethics of care is extended to the relationship between humans, animals, and the endangered environment. © 2022 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Coping with COVID: pandemic narratives for Australian children.

The experience of the COVID-19 pandemic can be recognised as traumatic for the way in which its sudden and unexpected onset disrupted a sense of ordinary life for so many around the world. Adults, and far less so children, were unable to prepare for the danger of the rapidly spreading disease. As such, both were left vulnerable to the experience of trauma and anxiety that surrounds the threat of COVID. Whereas adults, however, have access to a range of resources and strategies for mental health protection, children of various ages need targeted resources to enable them to understand, prepare for, and come to terms with a trauma situation. A great deal of research exists around the value of children developing their own narratives as a means of coming to terms with trauma, such that storytelling is identified as a primary coping device. Similarly, literature exists that compares parental narratives of trauma with those of their children. Moreover, the use of the fairy tale as a cautionary tale has long been examined. What has not been established is the way in which contemporary multimedia narratives - such as television programmes, animations, and digital stories - can be used to develop coping strategies in children and to mitigate anxiety in young people experiencing global or collective trauma. This article examines a selection of such narratives produced for Australian children during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a cross-disciplinary framework, this work considers how these resources can help (or hinder) mental health recovery in young children under the age of five, as well as strategies for best practice in the future development of trauma-informed resources for this age group.

The work of liberal health professionals in the COVID-19 pandemic context

(Portuguese) A partir de marco de 2020 a pandemia da COVID-19 gerou importantes impactos sobre o trabalho em escala mundial. Diante da inexistencia de uma vacina, as medidas mais adotadas foram o distanciamento social e preferencia pelo trabalho remoto. O presente estudo buscou compreender quais significados que oito profissionais liberais da area da saude estavam atribuindo aos seus oficios em meio a esse contexto. Foram realizados encontros dialogicos com um odontologo, um medico, uma terapeuta ocupacional, uma enfermeira, um psicologo, uma fisioterapeuta, uma fonoaudiologa e uma nutricionista registrados por meio de narrativas compreensivas. Tres categorias de resultados foram encontradas: 1) o significado do trabalho, 2) a opcao pela atuacao liberal e 3) as implicacoes da pandemia. Foi possivel constatar como os efeitos da pandemia foram sendo vividos de maneiras peculiares por cada um dos participantes e fazendo-os repensar, em alguns casos, o significado do trabalho em suas vidas. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved) (Spanish) A partir de marzo de 2020, la pandemia COVID-19 causo importantes impactos en el trabajo a escala global. A falta de una vacuna, las medidas mas adoptadas fueron la distancia social y la preferencia por el trabajo a distancia. El presente estudio busco comprender que significados atribuian ocho profesionales de la salud a su trabajo en este contexto. Se realizaron encuentros en los que se dialogo con un dentista, un medico, una terapeuta ocupacional, una enfermera, un psicologo, una fisioterapeuta, una logopeda y una nutricionista, registrados a traves de relatos exhaustivos Se encontraron tres categorias de resultados: 1) el significado del trabajo, 2) la opcion por la practica liberal y 3) las implicaciones de la pandemia. Se pudo comprobar como los efectos de la pandemia estaban siendo vividos de forma peculiar por cada uno de los participantes y les hacia replantearse, en algunos casos, el significado del trabajo en sus vidas. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved)