Interactive Cultural Activities in Virtual Study Abroad during the Pandemic and Beyond

Some of the simplest affordances of study abroad became unavailable when students stayed stateside because of the pandemic-induced disruptions to international travel. These ranged from touring city and historical/cultural landmarks, having spontaneous and chance interactions with locals, participating in the performance of traditions and practices, visiting homes, engaging in "domestic" activities with host families and local peers, and developing a sense of community with other fellow students. This paper reports on three alternate, virtual cultural activities that were launched during the pandemic between a U.S. university and its study abroad partner institution in Morocco in order to help compensate for the health disruption. Survey responses, cultural products, and reflections from 118 participants were collected for this study over two Arabic summer intensive programs at the stateside university. The study explores the effectiveness of these activities in promoting intercultural competence and student engagement during this period and speculates on how they can be integrated into the regular programming post-pandemic in order to further enhance immersion.

Narrative Encounters of Pedagogic Partnership, and the Development of Collegial Capital in Higher Education

Purpose: The study explores the relational encounters of five higher education tutors and programme leaders, working in collaboration across contrasting institutions--one, a modern, civic university in the Global North, and the other, a parastatal institution in the Global South. The purpose of the study is to deepen the understanding of evolving collegiality within a transnational partnership, stimulated by the COVID-19 pandemic related shift to online teaching and learning. Design/methodology/approach: The inquiry is informed conceptually by the concept of narrative encounter as a site of learning, with inductive, meta-analysis undertaken across our individual reflective narratives. Findings: The narratives reveal three emergent themes--shared purpose, shared responsibility -- through focus, routinised dialogue and concreteness;collective and individual risk-taking -- through negotiated decision-making;and trust in self and in peers -- through reciprocity, caring, duality and building on stable practices. Research limitations/implications: The data from which this paper is developed and its related central thesis of collegial capital are limited and partial. However, when agility within higher education partnerships is at a premium, this paper is a useful touchstone for further reflection. Originality/value: The paper seeks to further the concept of collegiality and collegial capital, a dialogical affordance which enabled the partnership to build on previous collaborative successes.

A Pandemic Partnership: Preservice Teachers and Fourth Graders Engage in Virtual Book Clubs

When preservice teachers were no longer able to visit schools due to the pandemic, their university professor partnered with an alum who teaches fourth grade to design and implement virtual book clubs. The preservice teachers created book trailers for the fourth graders to view and choose from for their book club. The groups connected using a variety of digital platforms and modalities to discuss the selected books. Through this virtual experience, the preservice teachers learned how to individualize their responses using the Four-N-Framework as a guide to nurture and nudge each reader through virtual book club conversations.

Strengthening the Bridge between Financial Aid and Study Abroad

This article features a case study from Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU), a large, public, urban, research university, in which challenges in administering financial aid for study abroad early in the COVID-19 pandemic led the Education Abroad and Student Financial Services teams to revisit practices and protocols. This article describes compliance concerns, student service, administrative optimization, and interdepartmental relationships. The outcomes emphasize the importance of a strong, sustained partnership between university study abroad and financial aid offices, provide a framework for administrative structures in managing financial aid for study abroad programs, and highlight strategies to provide equitable study abroad opportunities.

Team of Caring Educators Delivering a Specialized Math Curriculum for Racialized Youth during COVID-19

This study examined the efficacy of an afternoon and weekend academic program called the "Community School Initiative" (CSI) during the COVID-19 pandemic. CSI was offered to racialized students and families from the Jane and Finch community in Toronto which is one of the most under-resourced neighbourhoods in Canada. It involved a partnership between private social enterprise "Spirit of Math" and non-profit organization "Youth Association for Academics, Athletics, and Character Education" (YAAACE). Seven teachers participated in a focus group and 33 students and parents completed a survey to express their experiences attending the CSI. Findings were identified using thematic analysis from a Critical Race Theory paradigm. Key characteristics of effective structural community-programming were identified. The results highlight the importance of access to opportunities in a culturally reflective manner to ensure student success through continuity of care particularly on evenings and weekends involving a team of caring educators.

Navigating Political Tensions over Schooling: Findings from the Fall 2022 American School District Panel Survey

Public schooling has always been politically fraught, but current disagreements over issues related to race, sexuality, gender, and COVID-19 have reached a tipping point. According to this report from the Center on Reinventing Public Education and RAND, half of school system leaders say that these disagreements are disrupting schooling. Almost one in three district leaders also said their educators had received verbal or written threats about politically controversial topics since fall 2021. The findings come from surveys issued to 300 district and charter network leaders and interviews with superintendents. Their responses shed light on how political polarization has affected classrooms and how districts are responding. This report presents results from the fall 2022 survey of the American School District Panel (ASDP). The ASDP is a research partnership between RAND and CRPE. The panel also collaborates with several other education organizations, including the Council of the Great City Schools and Kitamba, to help improve outcomes for students throughout the United States.

Moonshot: Redesigning NASA's High School Aerospace Scholars Experience at Johnson Space Center for Online Delivery

Moonshot is the redesign of NASA's High School Aerospace Scholars (HAS), which traditionally engaged Texas high school juniors in a 16-week online course for credit and an intense week-long onsite experience working in teams with experts at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC). Due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), our challenge was to design, develop, and deliver an online virtual experience to replace the all-expenses-paid six-day residential summer experience at JSC where HAS participants traditionally work with like-minded peers and NASA experts on authentic design challenges.

Entrepreneurially Minded Learning in the Unit Operations Laboratory through Community Engagement in a Blended Teaching Environment

Online and blended learning opportunities in Chemical Engineering curriculum emerged due to COVID-19. After eight weeks of in-person Unit Operations Laboratory sessions, a remote-learning open-ended final project was assigned to student teams. The assignment involved aspects related to entrepreneurially-minded learning (EML) and community-based learning (CBL). Results show correlations between self-directed learning and the EML framework. Continuous support and involvement of a community partner correlate to students' motivation, critical for successful remote-learning implementations in engineering education.

Learning Creates Australia: Evaluation of the Learner's Journey Social Lab. Research Report. RR-A1139-1

Social labs have recently been gaining traction in a wide range of sectors internationally, and have been applied to many complex social problems, including food system security, poverty and labour market revitalisation. Social labs convene participants to collaborate and work collectively on developing prototypes that are iteratively refined and improved. Ultimately, social labs aspire to make macro-level changes that address a core problem. Learning Creates Australia (LCAust) launched in 2020 just prior to the onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic with the objective of convening an alliance of people and organisations that could systematically reform the Australian education system to ensure that all young Australians have opportunities to learn and develop the knowledge, skills and competencies that will enable them to become successful in school, find productive employment and actively engage in their communities. LCAust invited the RAND Corporation to conduct a mixed-methods evaluation study that would offer formative feedback to the social lab implementation team and ultimately provide a summative assessment of the progress of the organisation over the first phase of its work. RAND sought to address three research questions in this evaluation: (1) How were the social labs designed and implemented to solve persistent problems of practice?, (2) What factors enabled or constrained implementation?, and (3) To what extent did LCAust's Phase I activities lay the groundwork for systemic impact? This report details findings from this evaluation. [This report was sponsored by Learning Creates Australia. This report was also prepared by RAND Australia.]

Pods in Action: Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy. A Microschool Offered Personalized Learning for Students, Support for Educators--and a Glimpse into Gaps in Policy

In response to concerns about the children of first responders needing a safe, supervised place to learn in the midst of COVID-19 school closures, the City of North Las Vegas funded education nonprofit Nevada Action to set up a microschool. Students left the school district to learn at the microschool, which received from the city facilities, funding for personnel, support from city employees, and marketing support. The microschool created small, personalized learning environments for children in grades 1-6, with a curriculum that provides individualized support and a focus on creating strong relationships with parents and families (grades 7-8 were added in 2021). It was open to all North Las Vegas residents and children of first responders--healthcare workers, police, and firefighters--throughout the greater Las Vegas Valley (which includes areas outside of North Las Vegas). This report offers a glimpse into the Southern Nevada Urban Micro Academy (SNUMA). This program presented a unique example of how local governments can use technology to create new learning options outside of local school districts that meet the needs of their communities.

Pods in Action: Joanna Rosa-Saenz. How a Bootstrapping Parent-Run Pod Served At-Risk Students

When the pandemic closed schools in Denver, an enterprising parent with community connections stepped in to meet immediate needs--and paved a new path to supporting students and families in the future. Joanna Rosa-Saenz determined to "turn negatives into positives" by using whatever means she had to ensure her children and others in the community had a safe space to continue learning. That meant stepping up and creating such a space herself. She converted her basement into a classroom, used her car like a school bus, and devoted her time and energy to support a pod that served up to 14 students at a given time. She welcomed them for as long as they needed to stay and charged no tuition. Older students mostly followed their school's remote instruction, with Rosa-Saenz serving in a supervisory role rather than providing direct academic instruction. True to Montessori-style teaching, Rosa-Saenz involved the older students as mentors for younger students. This article provides details on how Rosa-Saenz operated a pod in her community, which led to strong relationships with students and between students.

Reinventing Reading in a Pandemic

Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) is the second largest school district in Tennessee. With 159 schools, 79,651 students, and 126 languages spoken, the student population is incredibly diverse, not only culturally but also socio-economically. MNPS shifted to virtual learning in late March 2020 on the heels of devastating tornadoes that ripped through the community on March 3, which abruptly caused the closure of schools. The early days of the pandemic were spent searching for hope amidst the devastation experienced by the community as it was cleaned up and re-built with the shadow of COVID-19 looming. With the start of the 2020-2021 school year, MNPS had to restore and increase access. The MNPS team of 130 school librarians were not only thinking about how to provide equitable services to their students and school communities, but together were also were thinking about how to provide equitable services across the district. This article shares how MNPS re-invented reading by breaking old rules and creating new ways to provide book access and support student literacy during virtual and hybrid learning.

Ethical Considerations and Reimaging State Corrections: Education and Work Partnerships for Offenders Return to Home and Community

This paper describes a mixed method study of 16,000 postings on Twitter, YouTube, and Reddit related to corrections (prison) reforms and a survey of 140 participants in this discourse who expressed a strong interest in reform focused on ethics, education, and work partnerships. The theoretical modeling of "what works," arguably, can facilitate the reform of individual offenders as well as rehabilitation and recidivism-reduction programs. The methodology combined a review of empirical research for years 1990 to 2018 with social media posts by members of the public and a narrative survey of public professionals. The results indicated that work, education, and morality all have significant roles to play in reimagining prison systems so that simply warehousing prisoners and "nothing works" thinking become ideas of the past. The COVID-19 pandemic and social justice concerns about prisoners have created conditions conducive to social media activism aimed at making prisons more humane. Accordingly, corrections professionals, policymakers, and students need solid research on these issues to assess the outcomes of corrections policies for communities.

Building a New Interdisciplinary Service-Learning Partnership through Virtual Connections

This article presents a synopsis of an interdisciplinary literacy-science, cross-country, fully remote service-learning (S-L) project prompted by and executed during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The article shares discussions, analyses, and evaluations from both community partners (staff of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences at Whiteville) and university faculty (education studies professors from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas) to highlight how the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic created unique opportunities for S-L. With summary of the S-L partnership's fully online development and comparisons to other, more traditional S-L projects completed pre-COVID-19, we offer readers logistical tips for navigating their own virtual S-L partnerships. The article concludes with student learning outcomes from pre- and postproject reflections and identification of interdisciplinary work benefits from both the professors and community partners.

Fostering Long-Lasting International Partnerships Based on Mutuality

The COVID-19 pandemic, the climate and refugee crises, and the global supply chain disruption, among others, have exemplified the high level of planetary connectedness the world endures today, making the phrase "we are all in this together" an undeniable fact. A joint statement from the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Department of Education on July 26, 2021 highlights the impact of internationalization on national security and the economy. These impacts occur because all forms of ties among people across national borders pave the way to partnerships and alliances in government, business, trade, science, innovation, and the arts and culture. While international partnerships can be problematic, those grounded in mutuality can be transformational for both partners. In this article, Pilar Mendoza describes her journey to build a joint research center that reflects mutuality and she offers recommendations based on her experiences that can help faculty and administrators develop and support similar international collaborations.

A Case Study of the Benefits of the Science Learning Partnerships in Early Years and Primary Education in England

This paper charts the recent history of the STEM Learning UK contracts with local Science Learning Partnerships (SLPs) and identifies what leadership has been made available to support the Early Years and Primary school sector. A case study approach is taken using 'Super SLP' hubs in England. Curriculum Hubs exist in core subject areas such as maths, English, science and computing. They have recently been expanded to include Behaviour Hubs. This forms the current DfE strategy of Teaching School Hubs (TSHs), i.e., to offer system support and a full career-length support for all stages of teacher-career and leadership development. This paper charts the changes to the Early Years (EY) and Primary teacher support networks, in science particularly, and examines what they provide and how this can be improved, and discusses, through session evaluation and feedback, what teachers have appreciated the most.

A Collaborative Model for University and K-12 Partnerships: Using Distance Learning Technology for Pre-Service Teacher Clinical Experiences

Classrooms are operating differently during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in lab-based courses. Virtual classrooms utilizing Zoom, Google Meet, or other conferencing software can create challenges for hands-on, lab-based classes. These virtual methods also pose problems for pre-service teacher education students attempting to gain much needed classroom experience through clinical hours in local school districts along with K-12 schools restricting access to classroom visitors. This article explores a unique partnership between one middle school and a pre-service technology and engineering education program that created a valuable teaching and learning experience for all participants, which can easily be adapted to other settings. In this article the authors explore the goals of pre-service clinical experiences, important considerations when collaborating via distance technology, and provide a step-by-step guide to assist in developing and implementing a partnership.

Three Days in March: Examining the Adaptive Expertise of a Teacher Leader at a Crucial Moment in a School-Embedded Teacher Preparation Program

Using an adaptive expertise lens, the following case study examined a teacher leader's perceptions of three crucial days in his life and practice. From March 13th to 16th, 2020, when his school responded to the COVID-19 virus, David1, a teacher leader, had to move a complex school-university learning partnership from in-person classes to an on-line environment. In the partnership, a graduate-level preservice teacher preparation program was embedded into the daily operation of an innovative project-based middle-school. In this partnership, David wore four hats: he taught 6th grade classes, taught a graduate-level technology course at the middle school in the teacher preparation program, co-directed the school university partnership, and conducted professional development for his school and district. In the midst of a rapidly changing global crisis, David had to coordinate changes to each of these four interconnected institutional levels (of which we study the first three). The following research question guided the study: What were the key factors that facilitated David's leadership for teacher preparation and partnership success? Three key findings emerged from the research as important contextual pieces that enabled David's adaptive expertise as a teacher-leader -- and which allowed the school-university partnership to continue for the full semester: (1) David's deep knowledge of educational technology, (2) his ability to respond to challenges by drawing on foundational beliefs and principles, and (3) the progressive leadership of administrators at multiple levels.

Innovative School-University Partnerships: Insights and Understandings from a Year-Long Internship

As educator preparation programs (EPPs) seek to enact programmatic innovations to effectively prepare candidates to enter the profession, they must create structures that empower teacher candidates (TCs) to apply their knowledge in increasingly complex situations within authentic contexts, i.e., the classroom (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015). These opportunities, or clinical experiences, represent an important vehicle for TCs to develop pedagogical skills as they observe and learn from clinical educators (CEs) while enacting the methods and strategies learned within university coursework (Cochran-Smith & Villegas, 2015, Zeichner, 2021). When delivered within school-university partnerships, opportunities to define, implement, and refine clinical experiences for TCs are maximized, thus enabling EPPs to systematically examine key elements to increase TCs readiness to teach (Snow et al., 2016, Zeichner, 2021). This article describes the multi-year development and implementation of an intensive year-long clinical experience delivered within the context of a school-university partnership. Subsequently, key findings and lingering questions are presented to provide stakeholders, including other EPPs, with sources of information to consider within the development and delivery of clinical experiences.

Technical Practices Used by Information Literacy and Media Information Literacy Services to Enable Academic Libraries to Handle the COVID-19 Pandemic

This study analyses the techniques and procedures that were developed and the changes that took place in the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and the Autonomous University of Puebla (BUAP), both in Mexico, and the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD), in the United States of America. To face the crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic, librarians in these institutions improved their Information Literacy (IL) and Media Information Literacy (MIL) programmes. Design/methodology/approach: This study has a mixed methodology with a comparative analysis. For this purpose, data shows the universities' contexts: the communities of students, teachers, researchers, and librarians, and the e-learning strategies of IL and MIL programmes. Findings: As part of the results of the crowdsourcing collaboration between the UMD, UNAM and BUAP, the study shows the different online learning communities and their innovations. Originality: Although there is theoretical knowledge about IL and MIL in Mexican universities and University of Minnesota Duluth, the e-learning strategies used by their librarians in this document sought to provide technical solutions and other options for a virtual work scheme that responded to the specific problems presented by COVID-19. In this case, the framework for creating online library services was designed by their librarians for their communities in the context of the current crisis, even when online services had already been established for more than ten years. Research limitations/implications: The technological infrastructure, the professionalisation of the library staff and a lack of knowledge of the new virtual teaching-learning needs. Practical implications: Analysis of tools for virtual teaching-learning services, description of strategies used by library staff, results and feedback. Social implications: IL and MIL strategies created in a variety of contexts can be enhanced by library collaboration in a fully virtual setting. Libraries with better technological infrastructure play a decisive role.