Is technology be our first concern, or should we be trying to “save the furniture” in rebuilding, renewing & transforming schools?

• In Event: Roundtable Session 4
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Country cases studies on the challenges and opportunities of education and technology integration

Proposal

There is a popular French expression “sauver les meubles” (save the furniture) which is used when confronted with impending calamities. Several international organizations representing practicing educators are calling for urgent actions to salvage some progress in rebuilding, renewing and transforming schools before 2030.
This session will first review recent reports documenting how the rebuilding after Covid has been largely abandoned, how countries will not be achieving most of the targets under Goal 4 , , and the other SDGs and how ongoing, valiant efforts by the UN to transform systems might be seen as re-arranging the proverbial deck chairs. This session takes a more practical approach, encouraging countries to select a limited number of salvage operations .
The session will then focus on five critical actions which were identified in the joint statement developed by the educator organizations representing education support workers, teachers, principals, school district administrators, senior school leaders, counsellors, psychologists, nurses and deans of education. Representatives from the educator organizations will discuss these five actions in panel presentations.
• Rebuilding after Covid by (1) building a multi-intervention program on pandemic preparedness/infectious diseases that includes strengthening school vaccine policies/campaigns, requiring health and life skills curricula to build health/vaccine literacy & support for public health measures and expanding extra-curricular & after school programs to promote social & emotional development
• Renewing commitments to SDGs by enabling countries to identify/document the barriers to learning most relevant to their students and then (2) strengthening & sustaining a limited number of relevant inter-ministry partnerships based on the many evidence-based Intersectoral Policy-Program Coordination Frameworks and then encouraging countries to (3) self-assess progress on these selected barriers in multi-stakeholder dialogues engaging local practitioners, researchers & officials rather than responding to the plethora of global surveys & UN agency monitoring a wide variety of initiatives which are often analyzed only in global reports
• Transforming school & other systems by (4) starting with the immediate, improvement steps suggested by the guidance note from UN Transforming Education Summit and UN Secretary-General Vision Statement but going further using systems thinking/science, organizational development strategies and proven education system transformative change/coherence models , to (5) initiate or implement proper education reform commissions.

Authors

• Douglas McCall, Global Network of Deans of Education

• Scott Pulizzi, Education Development Center Edc