Teachers’ Right to Health in the Policy Debates During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Hungary and Romania

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, governments worldwide suspended face-to-face education in schools to manage the spread of the Sars-Cov-2 virus. Romania and Hungary were not exceptional in this regard during the first wave of the pandemic. However, further along, the two countries’ policy pathways strongly diverged. Hungary strategized keeping schools open to ensure parents could attend to their employment obligations. Romania suspended face-to-face education in schools for long periods. The paper looks at these two national cases through a Critical Frame Analysis (Dombos et al., 2012) of education policy debates during the initial three waves of the pandemic (March 2020 – July 2021). It answers the question: How were the health rights of teachers and the health crisis in education framed in the education policy debates during the Covid-19 pandemic? Policy documents and policy related position documents by non-government actors were selected by country experts from both countries and coded inductively looking at the right to education, the right to health, and the relationship between economic activities and education. We present our findings concerning how teachers’ rights to health are featured in the policy debates between the government, oppositional political parties, trade unions and other stakeholders. Finally, we use our analysis to point to recommendations addressing the complex challenge of equally ensuring vulnerable pupils’ rights to education and teachers’ rights to health through coherent crisis management policies

1. Challenges to Understanding Curriculum Development: Lessons from a Pedagogy Class with Arts Pre-Service Student-Teachers

The intent to structure valuable learning experiences, focusing on student-teachers’ exercise of pedagogical creativity and informed critical reasoning, may prove particularly challenging in the current national curriculum for pre-service teacher education. It is proposed here a reflective view of the challenges to arts pre-service student-teachers understandings of concepts and processes related to curriculum development; findings of previous empirical exploratory research questioning student-teachers conceptions of learning, and identity issues related to induction practices drawing heavily on apprenticeship models of learning feed into the proposed analysis. It is concluded on possible conceptual and methodological shifts towards understanding learning in teacher education

Teachers’ digital competences in the first educational policy responses to the COVID-19 crisis in four countries

With the sudden widespread closure of schools since February-March 2020 due to the physical distancing measures associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, the digital competences became a focus of attention, being of central importance to the swift and equitable transition to the various forms of emergency remote teaching implemented throughout the world as a strategy to insure continuity in education. This almost instantaneous mass shift to teaching online has made transparent great disparities in how digital competences – particularly those of teachers - were conceptualized, taught and assessed within various educational programs. We present a comparative analysis of the approaches to teachers’ learning and professional development that state and non-state actors in four Central and East European countries have articulated in the first months of COVID-19 related lockdown. We take a Critical Frame Analysis approach to exploring the roles played by state and non-state actors in the four countries in conceptually framing the relationship between the digital competences required in emergency remote teaching and teachers’ learning and professional development at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis. It is suggested that the educational policy debate at the beginning of the crisis rendered visible: a) that this massive sudden shift required understanding digitalization as a complex multifaceted process requiring levels of digital and pedagogical competence teachers were unlikely to have previously developed; b) that addressing these issues through short-term interventions would only exacerbate the risk of ignoring arising equity issues; c) that situating emergency measures in the context of potential medium and long-term developments could open opportunities to explore mainstreaming the digitalization of education and promoting blended learning, as well as offer a better perspective on issues of digital poverty and the inequitable impact of not addressing it adequately will have in the futur