In unprecedented times, maintaining education for learners across the spectrum has been a huge challenge, requiring educators to adapt quickly to online teaching and learning models.
A vast array of technologies and learning resources emerged for teaching staff and students of all ages to grapple with and embrace. Preliminary research suggests that many professionals in education felt they were given insufficient levels of training with few support mechanisms, and this has had a negative impact on their mental wellbeing. Students too have faced enormous challenges engaging with learning and for a significant minority, continuous and quality access to technology remains a major stumbling block. Some of the most disadvantaged children and young people have been left even further behind: The Covid-19 pandemic has both revealed and exacerbated the scale of this digital divide.
This event bought together practitioners and academics from across all sectors of education to examine the repercussions of the rapid and dramatic switch to teaching and learning online as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown measures, and how this has affected mental wellbeing in education communities. What lessons can be learned? As we face an uncertain future, one constant will be technology. Educators, researchers and policy makers require new approaches to understand how the education experience is changing in the context of digital technologies and how this is inextricably tied to mental wellbeing.
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