Mitigating COVID-19 ‘Learning Loss’: Reckoning with the Racial and Colonial Legacies of the Aid/Development Industry

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Contesting Dominant Paradigms: Race, Play, Pandemic, and Teachers in Education in Emergencies

Proposal

Global education actors agree that the COVID-19 pandemic was an educational crisis that posed a grave threat to ensuring “inclusive and equitable quality education and promot[ing] lifelong learning opportunities for all” (United Nations Division for Sustainable Development Goals, 2015). However, the idea of a global response to COVID-19 masked a more troubling concern: the racist and colonialist logics that imbue the aid/development industry itself. In the COVID-19 response, global education actors pooled and redirected funds, influenced policy, and provided technical assistance to education systems in so-called ‘crisis-affected’ and ‘developing’ countries in the Global South to prevent and mitigate ‘learning loss’. They prioritized interventions that offered distance learning while schools were closed; provided psychosocial, nutrition, and wellbeing supports so learners could return when schools reopened; and condensed curricula in remedial, catch-up, or accelerated education programs to help learners get ‘back on track’. However, despite clear power hierarchies between these global organizations and their local counterparts—and even in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in the US and subsequent protests around the world—the aid/development field evaded substantive reckoning with the historical and political foundations of these interventions (White, 2002; Kothari, 2006; Sriprakash, Tikly and Walker, 2020; Strong et al., 2023).

In this paper, I use Mills’ (1997, 2007, 2015) concept of Global White Ignorance to interrogate the perpetuation of White supremacy and coloniality in the COVID-19 education response. I do so by conducting a critical thematic analysis of 11 policy guidance documents developed by various global organizations intended to influence the education policies of developing and crisis-affected countries. Instead of critically examining how power hierarchies contribute to inequities in education and committing to redress them, global education actors engage in three ‘erasures’. First, they whitewash histories of racism and colonialism, using euphemisms and generalizations to describe educational inequity and power hierarchies. Second, they fail to address the socio-structural foundations of the pandemic’s impact, promoting technocratic solutions instead. Third, they minimize the responsibility of global actors and place the burden of alleviating the impacts of the pandemic on ‘local’ actors. Through these three erasures, global education organizations reinforce White supremacy and Western hegemony, ultimately exacerbating systemic inequalities, rather than contributing towards inclusive and equitable education for all.

Concluding this paper, I pose a key question: What role can and should global education actors play in ensuring a more just and equitable future? The paper contributes to ongoing and considerable debate among scholars and practitioners about whether pragmatic reformations will lead to this change, or if we need radical transformation and reimagination.

Author

• Kayla Boisvert