Nostalgia made a comeback under COVID-19. In the context of enforced lockdowns, there was an increase in nostalgic activities such as watching classic films, baking and reminiscing with family and friends.

Nostalgia can be defined as a feeling of .

When it isn’t excessive, nostalgia can be a productive feeling that provides a sense of .

As writer Danielle Campoamor explains, “nostalgia serves as a kind of emotional pacifier, helping us to become accustomed to a new reality that is jarring, stressful and traumatic.”

But nostalgia can create an overly simplistic picture of the past that hinders attention to the present and limits the imagination of a different future.

Read the full article co-authored by Associate Professor Lisa Farley (Faculty of Education, 91��ɫ) in .

The post The Conversation: Nostalgia for childhoods of the past overlooks children’s experiences today appeared first on Faculty of Education.

Beyhan Farhadi, a post-doctoral researcher in the Faculty of Education at 91��ɫ, discusses the relationship between educational policy, online learning, and equity during COVID-19. Farhadi says “the push for online learning is going to result in a lack of access to in-person programming.”

"Let's begin with the fact that online learning was perhaps most taken advantage of by people who could take their kids elsewhere, maybe to the cottage, and set them up on the Wi-Fi and they could learn and all of that is wonderful, but we know that isn't most people in this province," says Farhadi, "The push for more and more online education will mean that for most families in Ontario, it's going to result in a lack of access to in-person programming and shortcuts to public education."

"With an opt-out option, you can only opt-out if you've got an option to learn in person," continues Farhadi, "But even if you opt-out, you risk losing the funding. I think this is one instance where what we're hearing doesn't really match what reality is."

Listen to the full podcast .

The post In the media: Educational policy, Online Learning, and Equity during COVID-19 appeared first on Faculty of Education.

Masks, social distancing and increased ventilation are all necessary pandemic measures in classrooms, but they can make for a difficult listening and hearing environment for students and teachers. While this is true for students with hearing loss, the capacity for COVID-19 measures to affect all students’ ability to hear clearly should also be considered.

Before COVID-19, classrooms already represented less-than-optimal-acoustic environments. It’s also true that young children, children who are learning a new language, children with language difficulties and children with recurrent ear infections have particular difficulty understanding speech in noisy situations.

The Elementary Teachers’ Federation of Ontario recognizes classroom noise as a barrier to teaching and learning. Read news coverage based on evidence, not alarm. COVID-19 measures potentially degrade the listening situation further because of masks, which remove visual cues for speech-reading and muffle the speaker’s voice, social distancing, plexiglass barriers or ventilation systems, which can add significant noise into the room.

Read the full article written by Associate Professor Pam Millett on .

The post The Conversation Canada - Masks and other pandemic measures are necessary at school, but can make it harder to hear in classrooms appeared first on Faculty of Education.

Many young students are facing problems getting back into the swing of school after the COVID-19 pandemic forced them to learn from home, where parents were nearby and rigid schedules were often replaced with loosely structured days.

Sarah Barrett, an education researcher and associate professor at 91��ɫ, said the pandemic also taught some kids how to be adaptable. As schools shifted from in-person to online — and back and forth again — kids learned flexibility and empathy, she said: “The pandemic made it possible to understand that the whole world was going through something.”

Barrett, who published a study on equity in online classrooms during the pandemic in March, recently reached out to the same 50 Ontario teachers she interviewed for that previous research to ask how students are adjusting to in-person learning.

Respondents mostly taught younger grades, though teachers of kindergarten to Grade 12 were represented. Barrett said the general consensus was that kids were “glad to be back, face-to-face with their friends.”

Because teachers are used to addressing the annual summer slide, she said many aren’t concerned by lags in reading or writing. But they do worry about students’ mental health.

The post In the Media: Teachers, parents find rocky return to school for kids adjusting to in-person class appeared first on Faculty of Education.

A desk with teaching supplies for children.

Amy Found said she remembers reading with kindergarten children from Grade 4 to Grade 6. She said it was her favourite thing to do. Her elementary school, Briargreen Public School in Ottawa, offered a program called reading buddies where older students were paired with younger ones to read together. 

It was programs like reading buddies and working with children at summer camps that Found said motivated her to become an educator. Found just finished her first year in early childhood education at Algonquin College.

A new research examining how childhood memories influence future educators who are preparing to work with children found her personal connection to teaching was not uncommon. 

In 2016, the researchers of the new study looked into different aspects of childhood for a journal called the . According to Lisa Farley, a researcher and education professor at 91��ɫ, the research team was interested in investigating how children are represented in classrooms and curriculum. This area of focus led them to research how teachers’ understanding of childhood might be affected by their own childhood memories. 

"If future educators analyze the impact of social structures on their experiences, it can help them recognize and challenge the inequities their students might face"

Professor Lisa Farley

Read the full article on

The post In the media - Thinking back: How childhood memories affect teachers appeared first on Faculty of Education.

Cristina Delgado Vintimilla is an assistant professor in early childhood education at 91��ɫ. But you could just as easily call her a teaching radical. As the University’s first pedagogista – an Italian word denoting an educational leader with a pronounced pedagogical vision – Vintimilla dismantles the human-centric approach to education that has served as the golden standard since the 19th century, if not longer. “It’s the kind of neoliberal, hyper-individualized education you might find in an assembly line,” she says in accented English, making piquant her disdain, “taking information in, regurgitating it out. A system designed only to supply the workforce of tomorrow. We need to continue to unsettle this idea.” And Vintimilla is.

Instead of using education as a tool for socialization, she joins forces with other education theorists to advance a pedagogy that promotes a sense of interdependence with “more than human worlds.” The goal is to focus education less on personal achievement and more on developing a greater sense of awareness of the complexity and interconnectedness of humans living on the planet.

Read the full article in the .

The post Entangled: Using education to teach interconnectedness in a fragmented world appeared first on Faculty of Education.

The 2021 federal budget and to create a . In response to this, Faculty of Education assistant professor Cristina Delgado Vintimilla along with other members of the , co-authored an article for the Conversation Canada outlining actions that the Federal government can take to build a sustainable and relevant early education system responsive to the concerns of the 21st century in response to the Federal Budget 2021.

Read the article .

The post The Conversation Canada - Federal budget 2021: 7 actions to ensure Canada’s ‘child-care plan’ is about education appeared first on Faculty of Education.

"The Materiality of Play: Early Childhood Education Research in Diffractive Dialogue with Dance as an Artistic Practice" will run from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m. on Zoom, and will feature guest speaker Tatiana Zakharova, an emerging scholar pursuing her doctorate at Western University (London, Canada).

Interest in play is experiencing a renaissance, with much been written in academic journals and discussed in professional and social media. Zakharova is among those interested in play, and with a background in design, she looks at materiality of play through the feminist practice of “misreading to produce a reading” (Jagodzinski, 1992, p. 172).

That is, instead of holding up play as an entity and an idea so solid that it even has a public “profile” that needs raising, Zakharova's proposition is to tease play apart into moments that may be entirely insignificant or subject-forming, that may be joyous or violent, that may open possibilities or may be propping up chaos and indeterminacy.

This talk will be in dialogue with Justine Chambers who will engage with Zakharova's propositions in diffractive ways from her perspective as a dancer, choreographer and mother. Zakharova will introduce her research on play and Chambers will introduce her artistic practice. Together they will present a dialogue as an invitation to reimagine our relations to play.

About Tatiana Zakharova
Zakharova is a playground designer, and is currently pursuing her PhD at the Faculty of Education at Western University (London, ON). In her multidisciplinary work, Zakharova thinks with feminist posthuman scholars to trouble the notion of play as a means of progress, imagining instead relationship-attuned play as worlding. With gratitude, Zakharova lives, walks, plays, and writes on the traditional territories of the Anishnabek, Haudenosaunee (Iroquois), and Ojibway/Chippewa peoples.

About Justine Chambers
Chambers is a dance artist living and working on the unceded Coast Salish territories of the Skwxwú7mesh, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh Nations. Her movement-based practice considers how choreography can be an empathic practice rooted in collaborative creation, close observation, and the body as a site of a cumulative embodied archive. Privileging what is felt over what is seen, she works with dances that are already there – the social choreographies present in the everyday. Chambers is Max Tyler-Hite’s mother.

Register in advance for this meeting at this link:
.
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Article is from the April 6, 2021 edition of

The post Learn about the 'materiality of play' during talk by emerging scholar appeared first on Faculty of Education.