Meaningful and Sustainable Educational Change in a Post-Pandemic World

• In Event: Education Policy and Reform (I)

Proposal

This panel session will provide an opportunity for participants to consider their practical experience in the field of education and educational leadership and the interplay between their leadership and organizational structure and design, and how policies and practices challenge and change institutions and systems. The question this presentation asks is, how have education systems advanced meaningful and sustainable change that has transformed their systems in ways that directly addressed issues of equity, voice, power, and adaptability post pandemic?


 
Meaningful and Sustainable Educational Change in a Post-Pandemic World

This paper session will allow participants to consider their practical experience in education and educational leadership, the interplay between their leadership and organizational structure and design, and how policies and practices challenge and change institutions and systems. The question this presentation asks is, how have education systems advanced meaningful and sustainable change that has transformed their systems in ways that directly addressed issues of equity, voice, power, and adaptability post-pandemic?

This paper session responds to the call for proposals for CIES conference sub-theme 4, pedagogies and protest. We looked at answering, in part, the question in the call, “How do different social movements learn from each other across regional and national contexts? We also touch upon, “What pedagogies might our education institutions and sets of classrooms embrace that enable the development of capacities to act?” A natural, health, or community disaster requires an immediate response by authorities and supporting agencies to save lives and provide food and shelter to those impacted by an emergency. Traditionally, areas facing a natural and/or a humanitarian disaster looked to governmental agencies and global governmental entities for the response infrastructure. However, through such response systems emerged a new approach - a ground-up mobilizing mechanism that leverages community strengths, assets, and wisdom to solve issues in ways most authentic to those affected. We have seen this take place in adjacent sectors, like global food distribution (for example the World Central Kitchen), as well as in education.

The example of the World Central Kitchen (WCK- https://wck.org) offers a powerful analogous to educational change needed in the post-pandemic world. WCK was formed over a decade ago and has to date served over 175 million meals in various disaster areas, with a mission to build local support and resiliency through culturally sustaining food distribution models. WCK created a new model of disaster relief, one that worked with local resources, built on community assets (local kitchens, staff, recipes, and diets), and addressed hunger relief from the ground up. As the WCK founder Jose Andres notes on his website, “Complex problems have simple solutions.” As opposed to accepting the existing structures, he built a complementary system that reimagined what the disaster relief food distribution could look like. He bet on simple solutions, cooking local food with community chefs, grandmothers, and volunteers, utilizing existing spaces, appliances, transportation, and local ingredients to design a local, familiar, comforting, and sustaining system. The entrepreneurial spirit, flexibility, and agility to course-correct, innovate, and reimagine in real time helped WCK become a global force in relief efforts. Their work has since their founding garnered international attention and acclaim and has established partnerships and changes within the very systems that prompted the WCK innovations. The idea of breaking down complexity into simple solutions, focusing on culturally sustaining practices that co-design and work with communities offers important lessons beyond food relief efforts.

Our societies have experienced a global-scale emergency, a shared experience with disproportionate responses, resources, and outcomes, that of the COVID-19 pandemic. Millions of students faced various disruptions in learning and access to resources. Adults struggled to support their children while juggling employment, ever-changing norms, expectations, and resources impacted by the pandemic.

The pandemic not only shined a light on well-documented inequities across the globe, but also the flexibilities (or inflexibilities) of systems to adapt, innovate, and transform to support the needs of learners. As the pandemic evolved, the education sector went from a crisis mode (moving students to online learning, wherever feasible, and food distribution) to taking the opportunity to reimagine learning (regarding curricular approaches and learning modalities), to reverting back to the status quo, the way the systems have been designed to function. “Going back to normal,” became a call within the sector that acknowledged the extraordinary period that appended our familiar routines and patterns, but also a call that was devoid of the recognition that the status quo did not serve many students well and that ‘normal’ ought to be a combination of familiar and new, systems change that transforms teaching, learning, and supports structures.

The effects of the global pandemic and ongoing social inequities impact multiple levels of our society, from individuals, and institutions that directly interact with the individuals, and communities where the individuals and institutions are contextually situated, to the broader systems that indirectly impact and influence the conditions and experiences of individuals. We thus apply our theoretical framework to Urie Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory, to demonstrate the role that each of us plays in enacting and sustaining change in a post-pandemic world.

Bronfenbrenner (1979), a developmental psychologist, posits that individual development is informed by the interaction with the surrounding environment, the ecosystems of influence, from the most immediate to distant surroundings that all play a role in the development and impact on an individual. At the center of the ecological systems theory is an individual, a whole person, their physical and mental well-being, experiences, and interactions. Each individual interacts at the micro level with others who represent various institutions that have a direct impact on the person’s life, from home, school, work, place of worship, local businesses, and community services. At a macro level, individuals are informed by the broader systems and structures, whether through systems such as the education sector, social and economic policies, or cultural contexts that guide the present. Combining these micro and macro factors creates a broader ecosystem of interacting layers that inform individual development, experiences, opportunities, and life outcomes.

Leadership and organizational theories of the past decades have advanced the importance of understanding complexity and chaos in our systems and society, centering strategy and adaptability as core prisms of systems change. The question this paper session asks is how education systems advance meaningful and sustaining change that has transformed their systems in ways that directly address issues of equity, voice, power, and adaptability. Through interactive questions and dialogue around focusing questions in this session, we hope to generate an opportunity for reflecting discussion of intersecting research and practice that supports meaningful educational change.

Authors

• Helen Janc Malone, Institute for Educational Leadership

• Olga Fellus

• Kristin Kew, New Mexico State University

• Deidre Le Fevre, University of Auckland