Pandemics & Society Webinar 16 April, “Teaching through the pandemic: What a 118-country study reveals about emergency remote instruction”
About the talk:
This talk examines how teachers and learners around the world coped when the COVID-19 pandemic forced education online almost overnight. Drawing on survey responses from over 8,000 teachers and students across 118 countries, the study offers one of the most geographically wide-ranging pictures of the emergency shift to remote teaching to date.
The study investigates a wide range of factors that shaped how teachers and students experienced the crisis. These include the level and type of institution teachers worked in, how classes were delivered, and whether the economic context of the country made a difference. The research also looks at the emotional and psychological dimensions of the experience – what drove stress and burnout among educators, and how teachers’ perceptions of their students’ wellbeing fed back into their own. A particular focus is placed on what the shift to online teaching meant for actual learning progress, and whether some groups of learners were more affected than others. On the student side, the talk will explore what distinguished those who coped relatively well from those who found the transition more difficult, and what all of this might mean for the future of online teaching.
Beyond the immediate teaching context, the study examines how the way people navigated the disruption was influenced by individual characteristics, such as having a more outgoing personality or speaking multiple languages. Implications will also be made for the optimal way to operationalise multilingualism.
About the speaker:
Michał B. Paradowski is a professor and teacher trainer at the Institute of Applied Linguistics, University of Warsaw, and a research and language teaching consultant. His work spans second language acquisition, bi- and multilingualism, psycholinguistics, and educational psychology, with a growing focus on how learning is shaped by social and situational factors, including in times of disruption. He has published over 80 scientific works and delivered more than 260 invited lectures, seminars and workshops worldwide.
You may also be interested in another upcoming talk by Michał B. Paradowski at the University of Oslo, as part of the Language and Cognition Forum series, on Friday 17 April at 12:15: Your network is your net worth: How social ties drive second language learning from sojourners to settlers. Place: Henrik Wergelands Hus, Meeting Room 421.
