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In this paper, urban planner, development consultant and educator, Mark Holland, outlines a rethinking of urban structure that will be supercharged as we learn from the impacts of COVID 19 on our cities. The modern city region has been focused on building high density downtowns and peripheral town centres, based on assumptions that are now out of date as a basis for regional planning. COVID 19 closed our downtowns and we now need to reinvent our urban and regional patterns in light of what we have (re)discovered from our pandemic response. Restructuring our economy, social patterns, food systems and regional growth patterns into a network of high-street-based corridors will not only make us more resilient to shocks like COVID 19, but overall create a much healthier, sustainable, and economically viable region. https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/23638/HollandFP2021.pdf?sequence=3

The school closures necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic created a rapid shift to alternative modes of educational delivery, primarily online learning and teacher-supported home-schooling. This shift has revealed deep inequities in education systems worldwide, as many children lost access to teachers and schooling. An effective response to these changes has tested teachers’ personal capacities and individual and collective agency intensely. The research lab we report on within this paper aimed to develop a better understanding of teacher agency in meeting the challenges of the pandemic and the physical and relational enablers and constraints of their environment. Drawing on case study reports from six international contexts and a series of online discussions with research lab participants, this study explores teachers’ enactment of agency in the context of various circumstances and environments. The authors argue that it is imperative that education systems support the enhancement of teachers’ personal and collective agency in the face of continued disruption to schooling and ongoing challenges to educational equity. This is an electronic copy of an article that was originally published as: Ehren, M.C.M., Madrid, R., Romiti, S., Armstrong, P.W., Fisher, P., & McWhorter, D.L. (2021). Teaching in the COVID-19 era: Understanding the opportunities and barriers for teacher agency. Perspectives in Education, 39(1), 61-76. http://dx.doi.org/10.18820/2519593S/pie.v39.i1.5 https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/24447/Fisherpdf?sequence=3

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a myriad of impacts and consequences for secondary school education resulting in, among other things, decreased student engagement and increased issues related to student mental health. The issues of student engagement and mental health are not borne solely from the pandemic however, and teachers have long been seeking ways to address these issues as our traditional educational paradigms lag behind in their ability to combat these problems. This Process Paper and accompanying Major Project seek to address these issues through the Critical Challenge Question, “How can gamified design increase student engagement to support improvements in mental health in secondary fine arts courses?” Photoshop Gamified is a sample gamified secondary elective course designed to introduce teachers to the principles and practice of gamification in secondary education through a research and evidence-based approach to course design and delivery. This sample gamified course utilizes the Google Suite for Education Learning Management System through the use of Google Sites, Docs, and Classroom and is intended for use in both face-to-face and blended learning environments. https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/25218/Janzen.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

Fully online Elementary learners face significant challenges in connecting and engaging meaningfully with other learners, their teachers, and with digitally presented and asynchronous content and instructional materials. Even though they often come to Distributed Learning (DL) programs in order to address specific and highly individual learning needs that are not being met in traditional group school settings, online students still desire and benefit from opportunities to participate and share in synchronous learning opportunities which motivate and engage in meaningful and personalized ways. The current COVID-19 situation as well as parent and student experiences with Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) have only heightened the need to find more connecting and supportive learning environments. This Process Paper utilizes current research and technologies to address the Critical Challenge Question, “How can a synchronous, gamified, and narrative-based Humanities course be designed to promote meaningful connection and engagement for fully online Grade 6 students?” A comprehensive Literature Review and application of Connectivist and Constructivist learning theory has contributed to the creation of a student website which blends synchronous and asynchronous elements. Through a narrative and gamified structure encompassing the use of points trackers, badges, and student-choice experiences, this Major Project is designed to meaningfully connect learners to their teacher and each other. Students engaging in personalized and interest-based learning opportunities while working together with their peers will experience a greater sense of connection, motivating and helping them to feel personally invested in their learning community. https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/25214/Standbridge.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Cultural Studies on May 4, 2021, available at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09502386.2021.1898031 Much has been and will continue to be made of ‘official responses’ to the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly around the varying success of prescribed isolation practices and how well (or not) people, taken in aggregate, complied with them. This paper examines a more spontaneous response to COVID-19 isolation that emerged: bread-porn. Taken literally, bread-porn is the competitive display of gratuitous pictures of home-baked bread across social media (particularly in the ‘west’), shared by people isolated at home. On the surface, such pictures perfunctorily depict bread; yet, it is argued that these pictures are more nuanced than that, and that the bread itself is almost immaterial. ‘COVID bread-porn’ was a jockeying for social standing and represented one of many unique, if temporary, forms of do-it-yourself (DIY) cultural currency while people were less able to access other extant systems of representational social stratification. The paper discusses the value and significance of the suffix ‘porn’ with respect to struggles to understand the extremities of new systems of value, by linking how temporary COVID culture fit into the flow of the cultural changes that preceded it. The paper argues that the world faced the COVID pandemic at a tumultuous time, ones marked by liminality between historically ‘physical’ and emerging ‘cerebral’ cultural practices in many societies (i.e. the move from manufacturing to ‘knowledge’ economies). Thus, it situates bread-porn as an attempt to ‘win’ at isolation by demonstrating prowess with available domestic resources, and highlights the productive tension of bread-porn that extends and potentially resists the social imperatives of pandemic self-management. Post-print version Published title: COVID bread-porn: Social stratification through displays of self-management. https://viurrspace.ca/bitstream/handle/10613/26540/MohabeerCulturalStudies.pdf?sequence=3