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Special Issue in Ethics & Education
Pedagogical Forms in Times of Pandemic
With the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus in the Spring 2020, campus life came to a halt. In many places all over the world, physical on campus seminars and lectures – pedagogical forms that prior to the outbreak of the pandemic were part of the very DNA of university life – could no longer take place like before and had to be either strictly regulated in terms of space and safety or simply converted into other forms. The loss of human togetherness and the reduction of teaching to a uniform activity on a flat digital screen (in wealthier parts of the world) echoed the sensory losses that were symptoms of the virus infection itself, turning the art of teaching almost from one day to the next into a two-dimensional and sterile experience.
Even if the prefix pan indicated that the global spread of the COVID-19 virus equally affected people all over the world, there were profound differences to be recognized. On local level, the pandemic magnified deep-rooted gendered, racial, economic, and social injustices, exposing perpetuated inequities particularly within the realm of education. In some contexts, schools were shut down and the children sent home, literally losing their education because of the pandemic. In others, the digital divide became a chasm, separating those who had access to electricity, computers, and the Internet from those who did not.
The above-mentioned challenges invigorated in teachers and researchers of education an interest in exploring pedagogical forms anew. The articles in this special issue reflect this exploration and they were all part of the discussions that took place during some tropically hot summer days by the end of August in Copenhagen in 2022, at the biannual conference of INPE (International Network of Philosophers of Education), generously hosted by the Danish School of Education (DPU), Aarhus University. During this much welcome on campus event after a long time of pandemic isolation, philosophers of education came together from all around the world to discuss and explore educational questions related to the current situation: Which pedagogical forms were made possible during the pandemic, and which were lost? Which forms are important to revisit and retrieve, how, and why, and which forms are hitherto unexplored (as pedagogical) and therefore in need of development? What are the consequences of digitalization and distance learning to the formative role of education? Which forms constitute a university and what becomes of the public role of education in times of pandemic when borders between the private and the public are redrawn? Which is the pedagogical meaning of collective rituals in schools and do the senses and the body play any role in teaching? These questions, and many others, were in focus at the conference.
This special issue offers two of the conference’s three keynote lectures in print, together with their response papers, and eight original articles – everything being part of the above-mentioned discussions in Denmark.
Opening the volume is Troy Richardson’s Terence McLaughlin’s Lecture Indigenous, Feminine and Technologist Relational Philosophies in the Time of Machine Learning, followed by a response by Sharon Todd. Richardson’s paper brings relational philosophies from Indigenous learning scientists and feminine philosophers of education to bear on machine learning and artificial intelligence. By pulling together fields of research that traditionally have been seen as separated from and unaffected by one another, and by bringing differing vocabularies on relationality into conversation, Richardson’s contribution is both innovative and bold. Acknowledging this, but also pointing to the limitations particularly in Richardson’s understanding of Noddings’s ethics of care, Sharon Todd’s response Educational Relational Networks: Indigenous and Feminist Worlding. A Response to Troy Richardson complicates the notion of relationality, for example by introducing the notion of ‘worlding’ – a verb that brings to light how worlds (in the plural and in plurality) are made of, and across, the relational fields and networks that our living with others entails. The practice of ‘”worlding” the world’ has profound educational and relational significance in the sense that it emphasizes, Todd writes, ‘bringing the world into being as it simultaneously brings us into being with it´.
The other keynote lecture in print here is Jan Masschelein’s Rejuvenating and regenerating on-campus education: Why particular forms of pedagogical life matter. This paper begins in a critical, almost dystopian sketching of the current state of the modern university but, like so often in Masschelein’s thinking, there is a work of natality in the making. In the main body of the paper, the focus is on rethinking the lecture and the seminar as two pedagogical forms (in need) of life – two forms, he argues, which in the current pedagogical climate of the ‘hyper-modern learning factory’ are approaching extinction and therefore in need of special attention and care. Masschelein does not stop at lamenting the current state of things but offers suggestions on what the work of rejuvenation and regeneration involves and what it might require of us as researchers of education. In Retrotopian Risks, Constant Translation, Without Noise Reduction: A Response to Jan Masschelein I offer three comments to the keynote in what I call a mood of affirmation. The first issues a warning against a too one-sided critique of digitalization in education, the second reminds us that a retrieval of inherited pedagogical forms is a work of constant translation, and the third suggests that a turn to orature never comes without noise reduction, that is, requires reflection on the discord that is also always calibrated in and through our voices.
After the keynote lectures and their responses, eight original articles follow.
In the first article, Being Universitas: Community and Being Present in Times of Pandemic, Amanda Fulford and David Locke place community and physical togetherness at the heart of their reflection on what constitutes the ‘being’ of a university. What the pandemic brought to our attention, they argue, is that something significant was lost when teachers and students were not physically together and they contrast between two forms of the university: being universitas and functioning as universitas, the latter becoming all too tangible and dominant during the lockdowns. The article issues the reminder that the shift towards functionalism is a tendency to be continuously critical of in higher education, also in postpandemic times.
Continuing the reflection on the physical dimensions of higher education, Jeff Stickney’s contribution, Pedagogies of Place: Conserving forms of place-based environmental education during a pandemic, articulates a worry that placeless and on-line forms of teaching and learning foreclose possibilities for transcendental and ecstatic experience, reducing thereby the elements of risk that are essential to education being educative. In response to this worry, he elaborates on the contributions of in situ teaching and learning, exploring what being placed in a certain place might mean as a pedagogical form. Moving-on from the notion of place to seeing the pandemic as a crisis, Glenn Hudaks’s article, Putting the Pandemic on the Table: What can this Crisis Reveal about the Essence of Education? takes issue with Jan Masschelein’s and Maarten Simmons’s ‘scholastic’ form of the school. What came to remain of the school when the foundations of its design were radically diminished during the pandemic, Hudak asks. By introducing the architectural notion of the spandrel which is a byproduct (form) of another form, the article elaborates on the very design and foundation of ‘the perfect public school: the table’s necessity’ in light of the pandemic.
Zooming in even more closely on the effects of the pandemic in Pedagogical Form, Study, and Formless Formation, Çağlar Köseoğlu and Julien Kloeg asks what actually became of the practice of study during this time period. Drawing particularly on the work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, they complicate the distinction between form and formlessness in their development of a notion of pedagogical form that does not lose sight of the idea of formation and that resonates with the practice of study in post-pandemic education. Letting the lens of our gaze remain in a close-up mode the subsequent article, Creating authentic connectedness online through a shared experience of ‘not-knowing’ by Lynne Wolbert and Asli Ünlüsoy, offers thick descriptions of a personal experience of online teaching where, as it turned out, the invited guest never showed up. The authors share their insights about how the students developed an authentic sense of connectedness in this situation despite (or because of) a shared sense of ‘not-knowing’ and what pedagogical forms that contributed to the enabling of this connectedness.
With Amy Shuffelton’s article Clocked by the Pandemic! On Gender and Time in Rousseau’s Émile, we begin our zooming out towards considering the more general educational issues that were brought to our attention during the time of pandemic. One such issue is the reliance of modern education on a certain notion of time – a notion that surfaced during the pandemic and that historically, Shuffelton argues, has rested on the sensibilities provided by mothers and ‘a feminized teaching force.’ To unravel the kind of care and attentiveness that this notion of women’s time has entailed, Shuffelton turns to a feminist reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his depiction of Sophie’s time in Émile. What a fresh look at this text might inspire in postpandemic times, she suggests, is a critical look at the gendered structures that modern education has foreclosed but still rests upon.
After rethinking time, we turn our ear to the notion of potential in the article Playing it by Ear: Potential as an Improvisatory Practice where Catherine Herring through a Deleuzian lens explores potential as a pedagogical form. What is meant, exactly, when one suggests that ‘someone has potential,’ she asks, and through a thoughtful exploration of the concept’s different registers she arrives at the conclusion that potential – in contrast to being a noun, a fixed trait, or an essence – is best understood as a creative process that comes close to what is involved in improvisation. As such, potential involves ‘chance, unpredictability, sense and sensation,’ she argues, and ‘must be valued as a legitimate part of teaching and learning.’
The special issue comes to a close but also to new beginnings with the article Laughing ourselves out of the closet: Comedy as a queer pedagogical form. Here, Seán Henry, Audrey Bryana and Aoife Neary explore comedy not as a (formal) set of fixed arrangements but as a kind of formation that can alter the dynamics between images, objects, and ideas and as such make possible ‘other ways of being and relating in the world.’ Using laughter as a pedagogical form, and by drawing on examples from sitcoms like Schitt’s Creek and Derry Girls, the authors bring into sight how different kinds of comedic modalities can assist us in laughing ourselves out of the ‘closets’ that we all are living in or that we are all trapped in, pointing thereby to the more general transformative potential of comedy and laughter in pedagogical settings.
If not with laughter, it is certainly with heartfelt gratitude to all the contributors of this special issue – and to the INPE community that asked me to be its programme chair for the conference in 2022 – that I send off this special issue as its guest editor. Take, and read!
Lovisa Bergdahl
Acknowledgments
The writing of this editorial as well as being the guest editor of this special issue was made possible by support from the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) as part of the research project ‘Forms of Formation: A Pedagogical-Philosophical Enquiry into Tensions Around Gender and Social Equality in the Classroom’ [project id: 2019-05482].
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).