Middle-class parental engagement in pandemic times: Developing strategies and mobilizing capitals

Despite the rhetoric of ‘we are all in this together’ during the COVID-19 pandemic, not all families experienced schooling disruption in 2020–2022 equally. Middle-class parents typically enjoy significant advantage over parents in working-class occupations. To illuminate class-based differences in parental engagement during the COVID-19 pandemic, here we present data from interviews with 15 middle-class Canadian parents. We found that middle-class parents successfully mobilized their economic, social, and cultural capital to manage challenges they faced: lack of structure and routine, lack of communication with the school, perceived low quality of instruction and resources, student isolation during online learning, and parental stress about children’s schooling during the pandemic. The main implication of the study is that although middle-class parents in the study acknowledged their privilege more compared to prior research on middle-class parental engagement, ultimately, their individual solutions to pandemic challenges merely exacerbated existing social inequalities in education

Conversations on critical thinking: can critical thinking find its way forward as the skill set and mindset of the century?

The capacity to successfully, positively engage with the cognitive capacities of critical thinking has become the benchmark of employability for many diverse industries across the globe and is considered critical for the development of informed, decisive global citizenship. Despite this, education systems in several countries have developed policies and practices that limit the opportunities for students to authentically participate in the discussions, debates, and evaluative thinking that serve to develop the skill set and mindset of critical thinkers. This writing examines the status of critical thinking in four different contexts across the globe as reflected in educational policies and academic experiences as a preface to investigating actual classroom practices and possible impacts the support of critical thinking skills may have on the potential development of the global citizens of the future. Each vignette reflects the contextualized difficulties that are presented by social and cultural concerns and traditions of making meaning. These stories of education also illustrate the various ways in which the skills and capacities of critical thinking are interpreted in different contexts and address the negative nuances with which thinking critically has become associated. Finally, a pedagogical model of teaching, which may support student development of the skill set of critical thinking within the boundaries of social and cultural mindsets, has been developed

Application of GIS technologies in the improvement of geodetic and cartographic works in land cadastre

Increasing the accuracy of geodetic measurement tools and methods used in land surveying, topographic mapping, and other works is one of the requirements of the current era. In this case, it is important to develop measures aimed at increasing the speed of geodetic surveying, increasing the accuracy of measuring land areas, and reducing labour productivity, time, and human resource costs. The use of electronic geodetic measuring devices in implementing these works is very convenient for implementing the above requirements. The difference between the current electronic geodetic measuring instruments and the previous ones is that they are designed to measure the angle, distance, and height of points simultaneously

Teachers and teaching islam and muslims in pluralistic societies: Claims, misunderstandings, and responses

The author argues that teachers’ positive work in the education of Muslim students needs to be emphasized and their voices contextualized and critically engaged. He problematizes notions that have been circulating in the public sphere around the education of Muslims in western contexts (racism, Islamophobia, school curricula that ignore Muslim perspectives and contributions) by simultaneously acknowledging and refuting them. He contextualizes these issues by linking them to what education means in the context of intensified communication between diverse peoples, multiple perspectives and globalization. He ends by highlighting the data’s implications for research, policies and practices in education as well as for teachers’ training in Canada and other pluralistic societies