Yorkville University faculty Dr. Ismail Fayed and Dr. Jill Cummings recently released a new book that’s been hailed by UNESCO as offering a “rich reflection on pathways for transforming the purpose and practice of education” in a post-pandemic world.
Published by Springer Nature, Teaching in the Post COVID-19 Era: World Education Dilemmas, Teaching Innovations and Solutions in the Age of Crisis is a 73-chapter handbook that features digital solutions, innovative teaching approaches, case studies, online learning models, and inventive remote/online frameworks – all contributed by a total of 144 authors from more than 30 countries worldwide.
“This volume provides insight into the wealth of innovation that has taken root over the past year…” Stefania Giannini, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Education, notes in one of four forewords to the peer-reviewed scholarly text.
“It brings together a wide diversity of viewpoints and expertise, spans all levels of learning and resonates with UNESCO’s humanistic and transformative vision of education, and the conviction that intellectual exchange and partnership nourishes human progress and advances the human right to education.”
Teaching in the Post COVID-19 Era started, Fayed said, as a “small-scale project” that he and Cummings first initiated in the wake of the first global lockdown in April 2020.
“When we started this whole thing, we were thinking it would be a simple book publication of a few chapters, so we were so surprised when so many individuals and educators reached out to share their ideas and their plans to write chapters,” said Fayed, Yorkville’s Educational Technology Project Director, attributing the interest in the book to both his and Cummings’ large networks of educators from all over the globe.
“We have colleagues in Egypt, the U.S., Europe, Australia – and we knew this pandemic was happening all over the world and that people were grappling with it,” added Cummings, Associate Dean of Faculty Development at Yorkville.
“We saw this project as a chance to share our expertise and also to look ahead to what we need to do in education.”
The handbook, which spans 757 pages (plus index), offers unique global perspectives on five main themes:
- Teaching in Crisis Situations
- Alternative Course Delivery Modes
- Innovative Teaching and Assessment Paradigms
- Teacher Education and Leadership
- Supporting Mental Health in Times of Anxiety
In total, Yorkville University and Toronto Film School faculty contributed to 32 of the book’s 73 chapters – including sections about remote synchronous delivery, counselling needs and supports for participants, leadership and teacher education, assessment, ethics, teaching film production, interior design, counsellor education, and teaching online.
“We have quite a rich background of expertise amongst our Yorkville and TFS faculty, so it was very much a collaborative project,” Cummings said of Teaching in the Post COVID-19 Era, which is now available at the Yorkville University Library here.
“Everybody’s really proud and taking a look at it now. And we’re doing a virtual book launch in March.”
Fayed and Cummings have also launched a website to accompany the handbook as a means to ensure that it remains an ongoing dynamic resource for digital teaching and learning.
The website, 2020era.ca, features frameworks, videos, presentations and publications, and other digital resources and activities – all developed by the authors to assist educators.
“It’s our next project, and it’s in development now,” Cummings said. “It will be available not only to the educators who contributed, but to all educators, so that we can all collectively continue this development of ideas and sharing of strategies.”
Intended as a platform for brainstorming and sharing in the middle of a global challenge, Fayed and Cummings said what they most hope readers ultimately take away from both the Teaching in the Post COVID-19 Era book and its accompanying website is “a way forward for the future.”
“Our contributors have developed some innovative approaches to teaching in a post-COVID-19 era, and by sharing them in this handbook, we hope to advance this type of teaching and learning,” Cummings said.
“It’s only by sharing and learning from what other educators and policymakers have done in different contexts – locally, regionally and internationally – that you can start building more confidence and more development of those ideas and initiatives,” Fayed added.
Teaching in the Post COVID-19 Era: World Education Dilemmas, Teaching Innovations and Solutions in the Age of Crisis is now available to order online via Springer Nature, Barnes & Noble, Chapters Indigo, and Amazon.
