The vibrant beauty of matter. The pandemic as an opportunity to reveal educational materiality

The pandemic has triggered changes that from a pedagogical point of view can be interpreted as accelerators of the digitalization processes of education and intensifiers of educational problems that have existed for some time. The pandemic scenario, despite its criticality, also represents a precious opportunity to unveil social and material assemblage that characterizes educational practices in their daily occurrence. In fact, in the current emergency, it is precisely that materiality made up of bodies, spaces, objects, rituals, affects, physical proximity that returns to prominence and to which we were not used to paying attention and that remained invisible, as it was taken for granted. The paper therefore intends to question the pedagogical and epistemological implications connected to the recovery of a gaze capable of reading educational materiality, in order to understand the transformations underway and to orient them towards sustainable educational futures.

Educational futures: Conflicting visions for Acirema “The Possible”

The year is 2070, yes, the 50th anniversary of the Roaring Year 2020. The United States of Acirema (Williams, 1997) was dealing with political discord, a struggling economy, a pandemic, and social unrest. Schiro (2013) published a book titled Curriculum Theory: Conflicting Visions and Enduring Concerns, which focused on four curriculum ideologies/visions: scholar academic, social efficiency, learner centered, and social reconstruction. Aciremas became very adamant on the futures of education and society, and the country quickly became known as the Divided States of Acirema with citizens being divided by their beliefs/visions for education and society. The four visions are best understood through the lens of four former high school friends who each live in different states. To begin with, George treasures the cultural values and knowledge from the past, wants to end the political discord, and unite the United States of Acirema. In contrast, Wally is learning new skills based on society needs, which enables him to be marketable in a struggling economy and the age of artificial intelligence. Next, Covid, who is the narrator, loves his state and is able to learn and live based on his personal interests and beliefs; therefore, this allowed him to conduct an ethnographic study (Fetterman, 1998; Hammersley and Atkinson, 1995) during the pandemic with the goal of uniting Acirema. Last, Justice is committed to ending social unrest by focusing on equality in her state and improving society for all. As Schiro (2013) clearly states in his thesis, these ideologies have conflicting visions for educational futures and are struggling with the ideal of syncretism (Berner U, 2001; Ezenweke and Kanu, 2012). After taking the ideology survey (Schiro, 2013) and discovering your beliefs and values, Covid, the narrator, will ask you to join him by using the Public Values Model (Rogers, 2020) to create syncretism where we can all live together as the United States of Acirema.

Close encounters that foster change: What Alice Sheldon and PPE 2020 can tell us about educational futures

In the preferable educational future imagined here, the year 2030 has seen massive conceptual and structural change throughout systems of education. In the higher educational landscape envisioned only 10 years in the future, institutions of higher education have moved beyond the goals of valuing diversity, equity, and inclusion and beyond recognizing the importance of interdisciplinary curricula focused on sustainable problem-solving. It has embraced those as central tenets as it evolved into the nimble, culturally responsive, and innovative site of learning it aspired to be since the late 20th century. Our institutions of higher education are now designed to educate the adaptive creatives that all professions and future professions require ( Aoun, 2017 ). The catalyst for this transformative change is examined, though not in predictive ways meant to determine new educational policy. It draws from the pandemic, protests, and elections (PPE) that came to define 2020, and it explores a potentially powerful metaphor from a science fiction short story by Alice Sheldon to encourage a reframing of current education praxis. The focus here is on a brief, creative exploration of a future educational scenario that need not be that far out of our aspirational reach.

University Students’ Perception, Evaluation and Spaces of Distance Learning during the COVID-19 Pandemic in Austria: What Can We Learn for Post-Pandemic Educational Futures?

The COVID-19 pandemic caught societies worldwide unprepared in 2020. In Austria, after a lockdown was decreed on 16 March 2020, educational institutions had to switch to a patched-up distance learning approach, which has been largely maintained to date. This article delivers empirical insights from an interdisciplinary mixed-methods research study that investigated university students’ perceptions of and experiences with distance learning as well as their educational (home) spaces during the pandemic in Innsbruck, Austria. It combines results from a quantitative survey conducted with 2742 students in early 2021 with a qualitative multi-method and longitudinal research study that accompanied 98 students throughout four data-collection phases in 2020. Results show a significant improvement since spring 2020 with both teachers and learners adjusting to the distance learning formats and the use of digital tools, yet students urgently desired a return to face-to-face teaching and university life, particularly for its social benefits. Strikingly, more than half of the participants wanted to maintain the option of overall distance education after the pandemic. Based on the perspectives of students, it is appropriate to demand significant changes in post-pandemic education adapted to the era of the post-digital, for which this article gives short-term as well as medium-term recommendations.

“Teachers Act Like We’re Robots”: TikTok as a Window Into Youth Experiences of Online Learning During COVID-19

Social media, and especially popular youth-focused platforms like TikTok, can offer a valuable window into youth experiences, including their perceptions of online learning. Building on a large-scale thematic analysis of 1,930 TikTok videos posted in March-June 2020, this study examines how young people shared their experiences of online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings indicate that youth portrayed online coursework as overwhelming and relentless against the traumatic background of the pandemic. They sought support, empathy, and authenticity from teachers, and both received and provided emotional and educational support to peers on the platform. Students’ home contexts emerged as particularly salient, making visible the intersections between young people’s home, school and social lives. By facilitating a grounded, bottom-up understanding of students’ experiences and perceptions—shared in their preferred spaces and modes of expression—this research stresses the need to attend to youth perspectives to craft more equitable and empowering educational futures.

Bitesized Teaching: educational futures for mental health training

Background/Aims Bitesized Teaching is an initiative that has worked successfully in Yorkshire and Derbyshire Mental Health Services for the last 5 years. It traditionally involves the delivery of high-impact, 10-minute tutorials on physical health topics, which take place once a week in the ward lunchtime handover period. This study evaluates an extension to the Bitesized Teaching scheme that incorporates delivering mental health-focused teaching topics to clinical staff on medical wards. Methods Bitesized Teaching was delivered by a mental health liaison team to medical ward staff with three rolling sessions in an hour. To monitor the improvement in knowledge, a pre and post 1–5 Likert scale questionnaire was used. Results The data showed that the knowledge from nursing staff improved on every topic. The topics ‘psychosis’ and ‘talking to people with psychosis’ had the greatest level of improvement in knowledge. Although the data reported a trend of increased knowledge, further analysis would need to explore the relevance the teaching topics had on clinical practice. Conclusions The results outline the need for general and paediatric nursing staff to receive specific mental health training with the intention to improve treatment outcome and wellbeing to patients admitted to hospital for acute medical care.

Venturing From Home: Writing (and Teaching) as Creative-Relational Inquiry for Alternative Educational Futures

This article explores the ecology of contemporary higher education by foregrounding the ethical relation between its authors. The article expresses their commitment to throwing off familiar academic conventions in order to promote human flourishing in a sector that has been colonized by new managerialism and the associated mechanisms of “performance management,” surveillance, and exclusion. The authors write into the emblems of the naajavaarsuk (the ivory gull) and isumataq (the Inuit storyteller). They explore collaborative writing as an ethical, relational practice whilst exposing the lived problematics that have become the “new normal” in the contemporary academy, for instance, the fetishization of “student satisfaction.” The latter has gained traction in the UK in recent years, and in extreme cases can call forth acts of ethical violence that induce deep and long-lasting effects. Their account is visceral rather than abstract, rooted in lived experience and in theory. The authors conclude that the precondition for human flourishing in conditions of constraint is neither all-out resistance nor quietist acceptance of the status quo. It is to open up a space for education that inheres in our relation to the other, and quietly to resist being defined and limited by practices of monitoring and surveillance.