Re-imagining teaching, learning, and well-being amidst the COVID-pandemic: challenges, opportunities, and recommendations

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented as one of the largest educational disruptions in recent times. It has wrought significant challenges to not only teaching and learning but also well-being. Students have experienced significant learning loss during the pandemic (Engzell et al., 2021; Skar et al., 2021; Storey & Zhang, 2021) and a decline in well-being among some student, teacher, and parent populations (Golberstein et al., 2020; Rajkumar, 2020). School closures have been enforced in almost every country creating immense change to the learning and teaching experiences of more than 1.7 billion students and their families spread over 188 countries (Schleicher, 2020). The impact of COVID-19 has been felt across all school and educational settings, including higher education, necessitating students, teachers, and educational practitioners to re-imagine education. In this special issue, we invited contributors to discuss the challenges and possibilities that students, teachers, and parents faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, identify the opportunities for adapting to the long-term challenges of the pandemic, and propose recommendations for educational systems grappling with the consequences of the pandemic for a world where COVID is endemic. This SI is global in scope and focuses on the nexus of teaching, learning, and wellbeing. It not only covers work done in Western developed countries such as the US and the UK but also highlights research in other parts of the world including Bangladesh, Chinese Mainland, Hong Kong SAR, India, the Philippines, Singapore, Turkey, and Vietnam. The articles are organized into two broad parts: teaching and learning (Part 1) and well-being (Part 2). The first four papers focus on issues of teaching and learning (Easterbrook et al., 2022; Foreman-Brown et al., 2022; Roy et al., 2022; Spiteri et al., 2022). They highlight the challenges faced by students and teachers during the shift to online teaching and learning and proffer some solutions to address these challenges. The second section concentrates on wellbeing related to students, teachers, and parents. The papers in this section provide potential solutions to maintain or increase well-being during uncertain times such as COVID-19 (Akdeniz & Gültekin Ahçı, 2022; Galanza et al., 2022; Harrison et al., 2022; Pham & Phan, 2022; Saw et al., 2022; Shenoi et al., 2022; Tan et al., 2022; Tiwari et al., 2022; Wang et al., 2022).