Responsive education in times of crisis

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Education and/in crisis

“Crisis” has become a prominent feature of contemporary social, cultural and political reality (Milstein, 2015). However, as scholars point out (e.g., Cordero, 2017; Koselleck, 2006; Milstein, 2015), the meaning of “crisis” is not always clearly defined. Historian Reinhart Koselleck (2006) has noted that in the last two centuries, “there has been an enormous quantitative expansion in the variety of meanings attached to the concept of crisis, but few corresponding gains in either clarity or precision” (p. 397). As Milstein (2015) reiterates, this lack of clarity and precision is still evident in the “crisis talk” that is used almost everywhere and about everything, from “global crisis” to “financial crisis”, “international crisis”, “ecological crisis”, “crisis of democracy” and so on. The media “turn every event into a crisis” with crises becoming daily or even hourly events, notes Gamble (2014, p. 28). However, once everything is perceived to be in more or less unending crisis, according to Holton (1987), then we are losing our capacity to discriminate between social pathology or breakdown, on the one side, and social normality and social order on the other. In this sense, crisis loses its overtones of danger and urgency for change, becoming a normal aspect of capitalist development (Rikowski, 2021).

The term “crisis” has its roots in the Greek word krisis, which means judgement or decision (Koselleck, 2006). Its origin was in medicine and was used to denote a “turning point” where the patient either recovers, dies or suffers some debilitation (e.g., amputation) (Rikowski, 2021). From the seventeenth century on, the term is used as a metaphor in politics, economics, history and psychology (Koselleck, 2006) to mark the moment at which the world loses its normal order and becomes problematic (Cordero, 2017). As Cordero explains, “The sense of distress, discontinuity and uncertainty all concur for crisis to become a moment ripe for questioning the conventional character of social norms and the intelligibility of social facts” (2017, p. 1). This questioning – e.g., “where are we, what is going on, what went wrong, how we can get out of here?” (ibid.) – indicates that crisis and critique are intertwined (Cordero, 2017). As Roitman (2014) also observes, the idea of crisis is conceptually tied to that of critique: identifying something as being in crisis can become the point of departure for critiquing the current state of affairs and exploring how to change things in order to deal with the consequences of a crisis situation. In this sense, writes Holloway (1992) “crisis does not simply refer to ‘hard times’, but to turning points” (p. 146), that is, moments of discontinuities, breaks and ruptures that offer opportunities to interrogate the normativity currently in place and to take actions for change (Cordero, 2017).

When it comes to education, although there has been some work on the entanglement between education and crisis – that is, the role of education in preventing or responding to a crisis, or even education itself as a source of crisis – there has been little sustained analysis of education crisis in the academic literature (Rikowski, 2015), that is, what makes a crisis an “education crisis”, and how education may generate or contribute to handling a crisis – for example, a social crisis, a political crisis, an economic crisis, a public health crisis, an ecological crisis or a naturally occurring crisis. There have been some notable exceptions, of course, over the years (e.g., Giroux, 2011; Sarup, 1982; Slater, 2015) that highlight, in particular, the crises emerging from neoliberal policies in education; however, the theorization of what constitutes “education crisis” is invariably elided (Rikowski, 2015), especially, when it comes to examining how specific education policies or practices can be valuable in responding to specific crises. As Biesta (2020) has recently pointed out, while “crisis” carries mostly negative connotations, this concept may also provide opportunities to critically reflect on things, interrupt the normal order, and initiate new ways of thinking and doing in education.

This special issue is an effort to contribute to a growing exploration of both education crisis and education in crisis. Blaming everything to neoliberalism in education, as the “classical theory of education crisis” suggests (see Rikowski, 2015, 2021), provides limited potential to theorizing the complex entanglements between education and crisis. For this reason, it is crucial that education scholars explore different manifestations of education and crisis in different contexts, particularly how crises may be viewed as crises of education. The COVID-19 pandemic, for example, may have further exacerbated educational inequalities, but in what sense this public health crisis is or has also become a crisis of education needs to be carefully explored. Similarly, a crisis of democracy may be interpreted differently in one context compared to another, and so how education authorities may respond will undoubtedly have to do with how “crisis” is conceptualized and understood within a social and political setting.

Our purpose here is to rethink the concept of “education and/in crisis” as a concept of educational theory, policy and praxis. More specifically, we are interested in showing different understandings of crisis and/in education might inform the way we think about pedagogical practice, education policy, and eventually educational change in situ (e.g., the Asia-Pacific region). In doing so, we borrow a number of foundational questions about the nature of the concept of crisis by Milstein (2015) and “transpose” those to the field of education, asking the following: What are educators doing when they say there is a crisis in/of education? What function does this concept serve? What assumptions are made when education scholars use the term “education crisis”? These are not questions explicitly answered by the authors of this special issue; rather, they are guiding questions that can be raised ex post facto to critically reflect on the use(fulness) of the concept of crisis in education.

Collectively, the articles in this special issue address various manifestations of contemporary crises – e.g., ecological, pandemic, democratic etc. – and explore how education is implicated in these crises – in the creation of a crisis, during a crisis, in post-crisis, and even in the acceleration of a crisis. In this sense, theorizing the concept of crisis and/in education calls not just for an abstract discussion and critical judgement but also for action in specific socio-political settings; hence, it is important to examine how specific actions taken during or after a particular crisis can be occasions for contesting normalities, transforming existing practices, and pursing educational reform that is just and meaningful. A key implication of the argument suggested here is that education crisis, as a concept that is applied within a specific socio-political context, is dependent on how the entanglement of education and crisis is conceptualized as situated, rather than as an abstract idea. As Milstein (2015, p. 155) clarifies, “Crisis presupposes that the dysfunction arises from within a social environment […] and it is from this supposition that participants can diagnose an event as a crisis on which they must and can take action”. To contextualize each crisis in/of education, then, is a crucial step in theorizing crisis and education as something meaningful and explicit.

Contributions

The first paper, Utopia as Method: A Response to Education in Crisis? By Elke Van Dermijnsbrugge and Stephen Chatelier, highlights the persistence of crisis discourses in education that often foreclose critical analysis and theorization of social and educational problems. Instead, the authors argue that current crises offer opportunities for reflection, imagination and judgement. Utilizing Levitas (2013) notion of “utopia as method” to imagine radical possibilities, they point to the ways “crisis” can initiate new ways of thinking, doing and being in education. Their paper examines the “learning crisis” reported on by UNESCO and the World Bank, based on test scores and other measurements of learning outcomes and the market, managerialist and “what works” logics that prioritize endless economic growth, human capital development and technocratic-instrumentalist solutions to educational problems. Dermijnsbrugge and Chatelier draw on utopia as archaeological, ontological, and architectural methods to analyse the OECD’s Global Competency Framework. These methods disrupt the taken-for-granted evidence-based “what works” order of education that really doesn’t seem to be working all that well in terms of offering adequate responses to the global and ecological crises related to inequality and climate change, for example. New methods are much needed to provide the means to imagine new possibilities in educational practice that might create more just, satisfying and sustainable futures.

Using the discursive lens of “crisis”, Peidong Yang rethinks international student mobility amidst the uncertainties created by COVID-19 and globalization. Drawing on his own body of work examining international student mobilities, Yang situates disruptions to the movement, recruitment and education of international students during COVID-19 in broader geopolitical, economic, and human capital (re)production crises that have historically shaped the education of international students. He finds that underneath the educational disruptions wrought by pandemic are deeper issues related to neoliberal logics, that some argue are a perpetuation of former colonial logics (e.g., see Stein, 2016), creating notable uncertainties for international students, international student mobility and higher education.

Ruth Ferris, Marie Clarke, Deirdre Raftery, Mags Liddy and Seaneen Sloan explore the challenges school leadership faced in managing digital poverty during the COVID-19 emergency lockdown in girls’ schools in India. Their paper highlights the types of immediate disruptions and demands the pandemic created for students, teachers, parents and school leaders posed by school closures, the move to remote learning and issues of access to technology for students and families. The authors demonstrate that even in a “digitally powerful” country like India, the use of educational technology for remote learning depended on leadership’s capacities to address not only the lack of resources, training and infrastructure necessary to manage disruptions but also social justice issues that were made more apparent by the disruptions, such as the range of digital divides (e.g., between urban-rural, rich-poor, private-public schools, etc.) that exist in society and the gender divide in education. Their study examined how women leaders in girls’ schools managed various crises of schooling brought about by the pandemic and demonstrated how educational leadership and the uses of educational technology are intimately entangled with issues of access and inequality.

While Yu Song’s paper doesn’t directly address educational crisis, it points to a growing recognition that educators need to rethink how students are engaged in classrooms and the importance of shifting away from the emphasis on rote learning to active participation in classroom learning. Yu Song’s study demonstrates the importance and challenges of moving towards classrooms that foster independent thinking, critical analysis of problems and the free expression of ideas. The social coherence necessary to address crisis requires reasoned dialogue, debate and deliberation, persuasive arguments based on sound evidence and the establishment of social consensus derived from public forms of reasoning, as well as the ability or willingness to address the affective dimensions that are central to these practices. Understanding and addressing public issues that confront citizens across the planet require cultivating students’ curiosity, tolerance for diverse ideas and desire for knowledge that can only be forged by strengthening links between curriculum and society.

War always precipitates a series of crises that reverberate across space and time in unforetold ways. Masako Shibata’s study of contested memories related to Okinawa’s colonial and war past demonstrates how important narratives about past crises, like war, are to understanding the brutality of war and its consequences on different groups of people. In a comprehensive study examining the narratives and photos used to depict and explain the Battle of Okinawa in 15 upper secondary school textbooks issued by six different Japanese publishing companies, as well as representations in the digital archives and guidebook of the Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum (OPPMM), Shibata found dissonance between how the OPPMM and most of the textbooks depicted the war. This was especially the case in terms of how the United States was perceived as well as how Okinawans were positioned within the Japanese nation. While there was variation across the textbooks, many textbooks downplayed or ignored the victimhood of Okinawan civilians. In Shibata’s study, we see how official history often omits “difficult knowledge”, the traumatic representations of past crises that might challenge a sense of national identity or a comfortable, glorified past (Britzman, 1998; Garrett, 2017; Zembylas, 2014).

Lee Fergusson, Anna Bonshek and I. Wayan Sutrisna, highlight the potential for a consciousness-based education to create a new educational paradigm. Their qualitative case study in Bali demonstrates that consciousness-based education can improve academic achievement and enhance student performance and well-being, while potentially offering the kind of educational possibilities suggested in Dermijnsbrugge and Chatelier’s paper in this issue – new educational practices to address wicked problems, develop greater empathy, and create new ethical perspectives. As Stein (2016) argues, the ethical, imaginative and political engagements in education must be viewed as mutually constitutive elements of public engagement necessary to confront crisis. These engagements depend on new forms of consciousness, new ways of thinking about the world and our relationship to it and new forms of social practice.

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a catalyst for teachers’ pedagogical innovation and uses of technology, according to Benjamin Luke Moorhouse and Kevin M. Wong. Their study examined Hong Kong primary and secondary school teachers’ readiness to use digital technologies in their teaching before the pandemic, their professional development and innovative classroom practices during the pandemic and the impact the pandemic had on their pedagogical and professional development. Their findings indicated that COVID-19 was a catalyst for teacher innovation and professional development. Moorhouse and Wong highlight key factors that support the change process for teachers and found three different phases in teacher change during the pandemic: the reactive phase, based on assumptions schools would resume face-to-face lessons in a short period; the experimentation phase, when alternative approaches were actively explored; and the stabilization phase as teachers became more comfortable teaching online and consolidated their learning through professional development. The experimentation phase was especially generative for teachers, “forcing” many to reconceptualize and transform their teaching in a digital learning environment.

Collectively, the articles in this issue highlight the many discourses of “crisis” that continue to circulate in society and education as a field. Taken as a whole, these articles point to how deeply imbricated schooling and the ways we think about schooling are in a range of contexts that make substantive change difficult. The discourses of crisis and the practices and ways of thinking they engender are always situated, arising within particular contexts that need to be more fully examined. While the articles suggest that crisis can be a turning point, leading to a range of changes in terms of classroom practices, a more fundamental reorganization of education requires a fundamental rethinking about the purposes of education, the willingness and capacity to question “what works” logics and re-imagine what education can be in different contexts.

Making use of crisis as a true turning point, a rupture that might provide greater or deeper opportunities for reflection, critique, questioning, and judgement means scholars, educators and citizens must continually ask some of the fundamental questions suggested at the beginning of this editorial, along with other questions: What function can the concept of crisis serve? How does education continue to be implicated in various crises – in the creation of a crisis, during a crisis, in post-crisis, and even in the acceleration or perpetuation of a crisis? Can crisis be leveraged to imagine education differently?