Educational Responsibility in Times of Crisis: The Beauty and Power of Disruption

• In Event: South African Teacher Education's Response to the Pandemic: A Critical Reflection!

Abstract

Higher education was not left untouched in the Covid-19 pandemic. The ensuing lockdown restrictions gave rise to rash emergency remote learning. As an academic, my experiences were moulded by the copious re-curriculations instilled by top-management. A driving force was the notion of curriculum coverage (Sayed & Singh, 2020) and to ensure qualification of learning (Biesta, 2009). Mooted in underlying performativity agenda, the goal to compete with other local universities in the service provided to students as its quest or race towards saving the academic year was rife. In haste, the university devised teaching-learning curricula and technologies that spun a web with loose threads as leaders chose to prize their clientele at all cost. As an academic, I was for the most part left by the wayside and became an artificial intelligence tool to ensure that top-managements promises of service delivery to students were met (Soudien, 2020).
The continuous re-curriculation led me to become estranged, as my curricula amounted to a technical act of administration and performativity. This hegemonic representation of curriculum reduced my teaching to instruction where learning was for acquisition and assessment for the measurement of what students had acquired or not (Aoki, 1999:180). Perpetuating market ideologies, deep learning was lost and I became lost in what I came to experience the curriculum as stranger. In and amongst this estrangeness lies not a longing for uniformity, standardisation or predictability but a need for self-examination. Drawing on the work of Kristeva (1991), Strangers to Ourselves, proved insightful in unlocking and engaging with the curriculum as a stranger so that I could disrupt my own teaching.
In my intellectual pursuit to understand my educational responsibility in a time where I allowed the curriculum to become a stranger, I became intrigued by the possibilities engendered in a slow pedagogy. As advocated for by the slow food movement (Petrini, 2001), slow pedagogy makes reclaiming cultural heritage, material pleasure, sensory experience, societal contexts and lived histories the first prize. I use principles invested in slow pedagogy to turn my teaching from curriculum-as-stranger to curriculum-as-lived. My experience could enable further discussions among curriculum leaders so that together we can use this pandemic to create avenues that reveal the beauty and power of disruption even in daunting and uncertain times that etch at the vulnerabilities of our tensions, paradoxes, pain and anxiety through its strangeness.
References
Aoki, T 1999. Rethinking curriculum and pedagogy. Kappa Delta Pi Record, Summer, 180-181.
Biesta, G. 2009. Good education in an age of measurement: on the need to reconnect with the question of purpose in education. Educational Assessment, Evaluation and Accountability, 21(1):33-46.
Petrini, C 2001. Slow food: the case for taste. Translated by William McCuaig. New York: Columbia University Press.
Sayed, Y. & Singh, M. 2020. Evidence and education policy making in South Africa during Covid-19: promises, researchers and policymakers in an age of unpredictability. Southern African Review of Education, 26(1):19-39.
Soudien, C. 2020. Systemic shock: how Covid-19 exposes our learning challenges in education. Southern African Review of Education, 26(1):6-19

Author

• Shan R. Simmonds, North-West University