How does Body Confidence Affect Online Learning in Today’s Pandemic?
Our webinar on Wednesday, hosted by Martin Staniforth, offered us an introduction to the Dove Self Esteem project. He offered us an invaluable insight into how the ‘Confident Me’ workshops work and how they help young people around the ages of 10 to 14 years. You can watch the webinar above. Check out the Dove Self Esteem website now for their brilliant resources.
You may wonder how self-esteem, body image and body confidence links to access to Education for All. We have talked in great detail in other posts about the digital divide and how many children cannot access distance learning because of it.
But what about the young people who do have access to online learning. How is their access to education affected by this pandemic? We may have a tendency to assume that as long as young people have access to technology and data then they will be fine. But things are never that simple. There can be many obstacles to children accessing education, and we need to listen to them to find out what these are.
Many young people in the UK are learning from home via a laptop, and engaging in ‘Live Lessons’. My son is one of them. I have often watched the teacher tirelessly trying to generate enthusiasm for a topic – to a wall of icons. I mentioned that it must be hard for a teacher to teach to a wall of icons, and asked my son why he didn’t switch on the camera. He confidently told me that for privacy and protection measures it was not allowed. 2 weeks later an email from the school requested that children switch on their cameras to better engage with the teacher. I asked my son about this again, and he told me that no way would he have a camera on for the other kids to laugh at how he looks.
Now many of us adults have been working via video conference for at least several months now, and if were to be honest with ourselves we would have to say that it is a distraction having an image of ourselves on screen all day. “Gosh I look terrible today”, “My goodness I have an annoying twitch”, “look at you yawning again”. We are now confronted with a steam of awareness about how we look and what we are doing, which we didn’t have to think about before. It can be hard for us to adjust and learn to filter it out.
It can be harder for children to do this. Their generation is more aware than ever of how a screen image can be used. They are super aware of how they appear on screen and what others can and probably will do with some one’s screen image. As we saw in the Webinar children are bombarded with images about how people should look. They are subjected to more idealised images per day than any other generation before them.
And now, they have to look at themselves on screen all day?
Is it likely that they will have a stream of negative inner dialogue about how they look? Are they likely to be able to concentrate on lessons, with their self-esteem crashing to the ground around them?
We may not be able to do much at this stage about the over saturation of Images of Perfection that they are subjected to on social media. But we can at least educate them to learn to read these images with more self- awareness. To ask the right questions that will help them to navigate the world they find themselves in.
And this is exactly what Martin does and shows us, in the ‘Confident Me’ workshop. It is the perfect antidote to the trials of how to learn online and navigate the complex world of seeing yourself on the screen as you work, and yet concentrate on a lesson. Or it will help the teachers to understand the reluctance to students switching on their cameras.
The more time young people have to spend online, the more we have to teach them how to navigate the pitfalls, as well, of course as celebrating the benefits.
There are many new areas for teachers to learn about, navigate and find solutions for, now more than ever. A fortiori, being asked to watch themselves in a screen mirror all day, surely Body Confidence is an absolute must to tackle right now.
Here is a link to the Dove Self Esteem website where teachers can find resources to run these workshops and start having an essential conversation with their students.
We hope you enjoyed this webinar, please have a look at the other webinars we are doing, and share them with your network so that your friends can benefit too.
Steve Sinnott Foundation Life Long Learning Webinars (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/the-steve-sinnott-foundation-31041261381)
Thank you for reading, please tell us in the comments bellow – how do you feel about video conferencing? What’s great about it, and what’s your challenge with it?
The Steve Sinnott Foundation • January 19, 2021
On Friday evening ( 29 May, 7.00 pm The Actors Church Covent Garden) we had the pleasure of listening to this very special concert, bringing together the Choir of King's College London and the Princeton High School Orchestra in a celebration of international friendship, collaboration, and shared values. This project reflects a commitment to peace, sustainability, equality, and cultural exchange, uniting young musicians from the United Kingdom and the United States through the universal language of music.
How a simple act of practical solidarity is transforming the journey to school in The Gambia’s Central River Region North Policies have been written. Schools have been built. Yet for many children in The Gambia’s Central River Region North, access to education is still measured in kilometres, not opportunity.
‘In a single hour vast tracts of shaded woodland became a jumble of torn trees and upturned soil, exposed to the glare of the summer sun. Such land-clearing events are rare, but forests exhibit remarkable resilience in the face of disaster. I’m told that the Chinese character for ‘catastrophe’ is the same as that which represents the word ‘opportunity’. And, the blowdown, while catastrophic, presented opportunities for many species.’ (Wall Kimmerer, 2003: 89). In the context of a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world (Stein, 2021) what kinds of education for hope might support children’s and young people’s critical engagement in local and global issues? In the spirit of exploring the possibilities of hope further, this short article focuses on the area of global citizenship and sustainabilityrelated education. It will briefly open by sharing commonalities across pedagogical approaches that take up the concept and act of hope more critically, and close by offering reflective questions for educators, with suggestions for further reading. Perhaps it is a kind of hope that is grounded in the present, in future reimagining(s), in ethical solidarity, and an acknowledgement of our deep entanglement with the living metabolism of planet earth 1 our singular home (UNESCO, 2021); a hope that engages with complex root causes and lived realities of multiple overlapping crises in critically reflexive and contextually relevant ways. As McCloskey notes, ‘Hope can fire our collective imagination and critical consciousness as a mainspring to activism and intervention in the world.’ (2025: 3). Commonalities across critical pedagogical approaches to hope include: Acknowledging the context of a ‘seamless single story of progress, development and human evolution’ (Andreotti, V.D.O., 2021b Relating to social and ecological justice and the wellbeing of people and planet Using participatory, action-orientated and inquiry-based learning processes Exploring diverse worldviews and perspectives Practising grounding in the present with opening up possibilities for change (relational, embodied, response-able 2 ) Experiencing ‘struggle’ in different forms (dialogical, selfreflexive, open-ended) Engaging individual and collective agency, action and activism Looking for lifelong and life-wide learning and unlearning. 1 See ‘Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness’, in Machado de Oliveira Andreotti. 2021a 2 See ‘Crossing Borders’ in 2 Depth Education “Depth Education and the Possibility of GCE Otherwise, 2021b. Source: Andreotti, V. 2021a & 2021b., Atif, A. (2025)., Bourn, D. 2021., Bryan. A. and Mochizuki,Y., 2024., Giroux, H.A. 2025., Meade, E. 2025. Whilst engaging in the concept and act of hope more critically reflect upon: What kinds of education for hope might you explore further and why? How might you provide generative spaces for engaging in diverse worldviews and perspectives? In what ways can you facilitate individual and collective agency? How might you support learners’ practice grounding in the present in order to relate differently? In what ways can you support learners in navigating complex root causes and lived realities of local and global issues? As Chief Ninawa Hini Kui affirms, ‘The future depends much less on the images we project ahead than on our capacity to repair relations and build relationships differently in the present.’ (Andreotti et al, 2023: 73. An invitation for further reading: Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future . d’Abreu, C., Belgeonne, C., Bourn, D. and Hatley, J. (2025) ‘Transformative Learning for a Sustainable Future’. DERC Research Paper 24. London: UCL Institute of Education. Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism. Machado de Oliveira Andreotti, V. (2021a) ‘Hospicing Modernity: facing humanity’s wrongs and the implications for social activism’ , London: Penguin Random House. Development Education and Hope . McCloskey, S. (2025). (ed) ‘Development Education and Hope’. ‘Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review’ , Vol. 41, Autumn. Centre for Global Education, Belfast. Link to and download the full reference list here
