Book on «Education in a crisis context»

COVID-19 as an opportunity for global learning

It is not just about the Coronavirus pandemic. There are so many major crisis around the Globe, that makes difficult to count them all: Hurricanes, Earthquakes, migration waves, conflicts, wars and a long etcetera. All of them are part of our civilisation, all of them leave a mark on the society, and on individuals.

Together with my colleagues Dr. Ahmed Tlili, from Smart Learning Institute at Beijing Normal University (BNU, China), and Prof. Anita Tabacco, from Politecnico di Torino (POLITO, Italy), we are editing a book to help shaping educational practices, out of practical experiences. We want to support learners, educators and academic managers in any context of crisis. Springer Nature, thanks to our fellow editors Melody Zhang and Sophie Li, from the Shanghai branch, will support this project. We all are working towards a speedy writing and editing process. We paste the book rationale below:

«Large scale outbreaks of epidemic disease, natural disaster or serious air pollution take place in the global wide, affecting not only humans’ wellbeing, but also education. Somehow, suddenly, education becomes another victim, and sustainable, effective learning and teaching are in danger. This book presents how to keep working on education in contexts of crisis, like emergencies, zones of conflict, wars and health pandemics, like with COVID-19. Specifically, this work shows a number of strategies to support global learning and teaching in online settings. Particularly, it first presents how to facilitate knowledge sharing and raising awareness about a specific crisis, to increase people’s safety, including educators and learners. The book then discusses various techniques, mechanisms and services that could be implemented to provide effective learning support for learners, especially in learning environments that they do not daily use, such as physical classrooms.

«This book presents how to keep working on education in contexts of crisis, like emergencies, zones of conflict, wars and health pandemics, like with COVID-19»

Further, the work presents how to teach and support online educators, no matter if they are school teachers, university lecturers, youth social workers, vocational training facilitators or of any other kind.  Finally, it describes worldwide case studies that have applied practical steps to keep education running during a crisis. This book provides readers with insights and guidelines on how to maintain learning undisrupted during contexts of crisis. Finally, this book provides basic and practical recommendations to the various stakeholders in educational contexts like, i.e. students, content providers, technology services, policy makers, school teachers, university lecturers, academic managers, and others, about flexible, personalised and effective education in the context of crisis.»

April, the 29th, 2020