Part of a mini series of Focus books on COVID-19 in Malaysia, the chapters in this book address the pandemic's impacts on education and literacy. Covering a range of teaching and learning challenges impacting learners and teachers, the contributors highlight the pervasiveness of the pandemic on Malaysian society and how Malaysians have found ways to cope. They focus mainly on students' COVID-19 narratives, digital and health literacy issues, language and new vocabulary. This is an opportunity to witness how researchers from multiple disciplines can join forces during challenging times. There are a great many lessons to be learned from the successes and failures in responding to the pandemic and the measures that have been necessary to contain it. A fascinating read for scholars and educators with an interest in crisis management in non-Western contexts, especially those with a particular interest in Malaysia, or Southeast Asia more generally.

The notion of change is central to this book. Across the globe, there exists a pressing need for transformation in the way teachers teach, in the manner by which learners learn, and in our approach towards defining literacy in the 21st century. Historically, the term 'literacy' has been used to primarily denote reading and writing abilities, a designation which is today largely considered both quintessential and overly simplistic. The field of literacy, like many others within the realm of education, has a tendency to evolve and shift from one paradigm to another, vacillating between the demands of globalisation and the implications brought forth by the advent of new technologies. Reading and writing - communication, in essence - is happening in very different ways and via varied avenues; blogs, podcasts, online news, and tablets coupled with countless applications. Such changes are increasingly borderless and rapidly accelerating, and are bound to influence the nature of literacy itself as well as how it is perceived in diverse contexts in different parts of the world. This calls for a reorientation with regard to how researchers, educators and stakeholders view literacy in today's terms.