Wreckage of Pandemic History: Lessons Learned, Communities Built, and Stories Told

REACTING TO THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC’S STORY AS AN EDUCATOR, researcher, spouse of a frontline worker, and mother whose children asked, “Will daddy ever come home?” became a way of life. Little did we know, our names were being written into the history of a pandemic that few would have ever imagined confronting in our lifetime.

Flashback: March 15, 2020

Driving on the steadfast lanes of New York State’s I-87, COVID-19 dominated our family conversation. In comprehending that ominous, red, ball-shaped virus with pin-like tendrils, our inquisitive youngsters posed questions, but we had no answers. Little did we know, the crimson-colored virus was staying, clutching the world in its jaws—clenching deeper and deeper, but bringing social issues of racial inequity and partisan politics to the surface.

Monday, March 16, 2020: A Historic Morning

New York City Public Schools transitioned to remote learning; Teachers College, Columbia University closed its doors and asked faculty and students to embrace distance learning. Our collective future as a family now largely affected, the children’s schooling experiences, my academic life, and my husband’s work as an ICU physician in a public hospital were factors that forced us to face our unknown fears. Our story of living in distance and isolation was just beginning.

A Coping Journey Begins

As days went by, the tensions of the unknown continued to escalate; we struggled. Perhaps as a means to cope, our dear friend, Nana Mary in Sydney, Australia, suggested we engage in collective artmaking using a word to which we could relate from the pandemic’s evolving lexicon. Our survival journey began with the word “mask.” As a family, using newspapers and poetry, we adopted collage making as our evening ritual. The children and Nana Mary alternated the words using the headlines from The New York Times and our favorite magazine, The New Yorker. This became a visual conversation among us and Nana Mary. Later, my mother from New York and a dear friend from Minneapolis joined us. A conversation from different perspectives of lived experiences continued to take form as a blog (https://samratami.wixsite.com/website). This collective blog became a site as we faced the reality of witnessing and encountering changes of historic proportions buried within the time capsule of COVID-19, subsequently becoming an inspiration for this special issue. As educators, we become a vital part of these historical stories, which we continue writing and collecting as the pandemic tightens its grip.

August 15, 2021: Reflections in Isolation

Walking through Abraham Lincoln’s birthplace in Hodgenville, Kentucky, I read Lincoln’s quote on a postcard at the gift shop: “History is not history unless it is the truth.” The words instantaneously echoed with the theme of this special issue, “Reflections in Isolation as History in the Making.” COVID-19 has transformed the way we think about pedagogy and ways of being. While things may remain tentative, and the new normal ambiguous, life continues. Reflecting on Lincoln’s quote, turning to the practice of documenting uncertain history as it happens so that future generations can better understand the unprecedented times faced becomes increasingly significant. Here, I am drawn to Anthea M. Hartig’s phrase: “We are [indeed] in the gristmill of history” (as cited in Dickson, 2020, para. 6).

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic and endemic systemic racism, we faced bracing interruption, disruption, fear, innumerable losses, and new uncertainties, which we will confront for years to come. We created new customs: the 7 pm clapping for frontline workers, teaching remotely using Zoom, visiting a virtual museum with friends, different generations waving at each other across windows and garden fences, sitting on the couch being glued to Netflix, the harrowing frostiness of bidding adieu to a loved one through a screen held up by an ICU physician, and keeping a journal of experiences, to name a few. We have mustered resources and pooled sustenance, formed newfangled practices to check in on our neighbors, family, and friends for enduring in altered conditions. We have stroked the strain of the pandemic, the resulting unemployment, a series of continuing political hullabaloo, a climate crisis, and mass lobbying against racial injustices and anti-Black police violence. We have come together under the tremendous burden of extraordinary circumstances. Yet, amid all of this, several of us have turned to art and stories as a form of history in the making, a history framed and unframed within the dark truths of our lived experiences.

What is a lived experience? Recognizing fresh promises within ordinary experiences, educational theorists D. Jean Clandinin and Jerry Rosiek (2007) ask that we lend a listening ear to the stories people tell. Spoken recollections and reflections frame narrative research, which highlights what we can learn about history and society through lived experiences (Chase, 2011). Making sense of the present moment through storytelling and documenting history as it happens is the heartbeat of one’s coping mechanism. The articles presented in this issue of Art Education connect us as a community of practice at a time marked by withdrawal and isolation. The various stories about experiencing distance and isolation are narratives of resilience, community building, and the restorative power of artmaking, representing the inner strength of the authors and their commitment as educators.

Sarah Ackermann and Trina Harlow retell a story that unfolded in a Facebook group during the pandemic. They compare art teachers to superheroes, proudly wearing their capes and helping to rescue their comrades from the dastardly villain dominating classrooms. The authors explain that as we live through the pandemic’s collective trauma, we must continue anchoring ourselves in creative expression, developing applicable and flexible curricula. Paramount in reframing our roles as practitioners, they call for creating an equitable community of practice and engaging art education experiences to help those who are feeling powerless to feel more prepared should another sequel occur. Amber Tackett emphasizes her reflexive practice and the interconnectedness of student experiences and the learning taking place in the classroom. This, she argues, can establish authentic and empowered learning for students while framing their positionality using knowledge of self and the world. Megan Broughton and Chris Thorson tell the Oxbow School’s pandemic story, recounting a complex turmoil of changes where faculty and students tried to maintain an interconnected semester experience. After losing their physical school community and sense of normalcy in the pandemic’s clutches, they created digital zines titled Quaranzines, which showcased student works from several assignments done during quarantine. This collective experience afforded some semblance of closure and showed the community’s collective resilience through creative expression. Drawing parallels between her teaching experience and participating in a synchronous online basketry conference, Christina Bain shares new openings for learning, relating with others, and accepting failure as an indispensable part of learning. These authors embody a reality of action and resilience that they eloquently frame throughout their lived experiences. As educators we associate with these narratives—we connect to comparable experiences in our own classrooms and envision potentials for actions while finding the right currency of words for doing the work (Goodall, 2008). Generating empathy, these stories allow us to frame and reframe meanings within one’s own teaching practice while navigating fractured living histories.

Surviving isolation and confronting remote learning, Kelly Hanning reveals a compelling personal story of wrestling with her own identity, pondering on building nurturing and sustaining relationships through creative vulnerability. Hanning sees herself as a digital relationship builder while scaffolding meaningful creative experiences in a virtual environment. Jane Brumfield Montero exemplifies the dire need to foster student alliances in the absence of face-to-face education, highlighting the merit of upholding frequent and meaningful student interactions, which can reduce loneliness during remote learning. Enthused by Thompson Walker’s (2012) novel The Age of Miracles, Carissa DiCindio recognizes similarities between the slowing of the Earth’s rotation in the novel and the slowing down of life during the pandemic, emphasizing the inevitability of consequential human connections during catastrophic events. DiCindio describes her experiences working with students in an undergraduate art museum education online course, highlighting the potential of creating online learning communities and building “digital relationships” through VoiceThread, a participatory presentation program to create online museum tours. Reflecting on a collaborative postal collage-making project that cultivated individual and communal experiences, Kristin Vanderlip Taylor argues that bolstering relationships and building leadership competence through synergistic art projects serves as a vehicle for broadening connections and commonalities. Seen collectively, the accounts presented by these authors echo Herman’s (2016) view that

shifting our perspective lets us see things for the first time or see things anew. The process can help us find both tiny details and earth-shattering, paradigm-shifting ideas, and you can use that information to solve problems and uncover new possibilities. (p. 143)

Juggling the challenges of being a new mother amid the mayhem of quarantining, Tara Carpenter Estrada uses images and words to create a daily work of art that is a meditation on something that she is grateful for. Reflecting on the cultural climate of 2020, Adam Zucker speaks to a need for motivating and empowering individual and collective voices using social distancing as an art movement with an educational intent. Resonating with Joseph Beuys’s concept of social sculpture, John Dewey’s philosophy of learning via experience, and Paulo Freire’s (1970) and bell hooks’s (1994) models of critical thinking, Zucker calls for a liberation from negative social, cultural, and emotional forces of the pandemic. He further elaborates how an artist works to reframe the conditions, thinking, and structures that contextualize and inform our lives. James Haywood Rolling, Jr. asks what would happen if we as artists and art educators utilize the countless ambiguities of this critical moment as an opportunity to press the reset button and furnish our communities, where we are “creatively response-able” once the shock and virulency of COVID-19 have passed. Rolling argues that revisiting our creative practices calls for the restoration of relational connections, a collective common heartbeat, and shared collective breath. Jessica Hamlin, Caitlin Gibbons, and Alexis Lambrou’s conversational instructional resource locates urgent concerns and questions about reaching students during online learning while confronting the pandemic, which exposed stark inequalities across race, class, and gender demographics that continue to plague education. These conversations offer a public commitment to promote community and the enormous possibilities that art offers to open spaces for sharing our unique truths while building meaningful connections and a sense of solidarity with others.

Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis’s well-timed and much-needed commentary delivers a critical (un)learning space for confronting disease—both the physical disease of COVID-19 and the symbolic disease of racism. Using “dis-ease(ing)” as a framework, the author questions the historical construction and dissemination of racialized narratives of political cartoons as a visual site associating Asian Americans with diseases. Bae-Dimitriadis explicitly argues for an alternative, antiracist visual rhetoric that has the impending potential to turn the “dis-ease” of racial toxicity toward social healing and equity.

Flash Forward: Continued Fear of the Future?

Reading through the empathetic and powerful stories in this issue while adding them to the time capsule of COVID-19 and art education, I could not resist pulling apart the words “immunity” and “resistance.” I see these words as important concepts emerging within our teaching and surviving vocabulary. Immunity, originating from the Latin word immūnitās and French immunité, is a legal term used to describe exemption from tax and jurisdiction. The word resistance derives from the Latin verb resistere, which means “holding back.” The interplay of the two words seems to converge on meanings whereby immunity might refer to an internal, individual self-aware state of mind, while resistance can describe a capacity to respond to external challenges through critical and creative actions. Both terms describe human dispositions that resonate with the stories told, communities built, and lessons learned from the stories presented in this special issue that unequivocally celebrates the significance of art. ■

—Ami Kantawala

Author Note

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to the senior editor at this address: Art & Art Education Program, Box 78, Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027. Email: [email protected]

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ami Kantawala

Ami Kantawala, Adjunct Associate Professor of Art and Art Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, New York.