The Present Shock and Time Re-appropriation in the Pandemic Era
- PDF / 585,666 Bytes
- 31 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 48 Downloads / 151 Views
The Present Shock and Time Re-appropriation in the Pandemic Era Missed Opportunities for Science Education Olivia Levrini 1 & Paola Fantini 1 & Eleonora Barelli 1 Sara Satanassi 1 & Giulia Tasquier 1
& Laura Branchetti
2
&
Accepted: 4 September 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
The crisis due to the COVID-19 pandemic led most people all over the world to deal with a change in their perception and organization of time. This happened also, and mainly, within the educational institutions, where students and teachers had to rearrange their teaching/learning dynamics because of the forced education at a distance. In this paper, we present an exploratory qualitative study with secondary school students aimed to investigate how they were experiencing their learning during lockdown and how, in particular, learning of science contributed to rearranging their daily lifetime rituals. In order to design and carry out our investigation, we borrowed constructs coming from a research field rather unusual for science education: the field of sociology of time. The main result concerns the discovery of the potential of the dichotomy between alienation from time and time re-appropriation. The former is a construct elaborated by the sociologist Hartmut Rosa to describe the society of acceleration in the “era of future shock”. The latter represents an elaboration of the construct of appropriation that the authors had operationally defined, starting from Bakhtin’s original idea, to describe the nexus between physics learning and identity. Thanks to the elaboration of the notion of time re-appropriation as feature of the “era of present shock”, the study unveils how school science, instead of preparing the young to navigate our fast-changing and complex society, tends to create “bubbles of rituals” that detach learning from societal concern.
The paper reports original research not simultaneously submitted to another publication outlet.
* Olivia Levrini [email protected]
1
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna, Via Irnerio 46, 40126 Bologna, Italy
2
Department of Mathematical, Physical and Computer Sciences, University of Parma, Parma, Italy
O. Levrini et al.
1 Introduction We have been experiencing an extraordinary period, during which many parts of the world have been locked down due to the coronavirus infection. This paper aims to respond to the challenge launched by Science & Education journal (Erduran 2020) and tries to offer a perspective to critically reflect on what lessons can we learn from the pandemic and how can we rethink, accordingly, on science teaching and its role to form the young generation in this fast-changing, global, and complex world. Reiss, in his recent paper on this journal, discusses crucial topics that regard the history, philosophy, and sociology of science that can contribute to science education in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic (Reiss 2020). In our paper, we address the theme from a deeply different perspective: we will not focus on the
Data Loading...
