Radical Flexibility and Relationality as Responses to Education in Times of Crisis
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Radical Flexibility and Relationality as Responses to Education in Times of Crisis George Veletsianos 1
& Shandell
Houlden 1
Accepted: 17 September 2020 / Published online: 2 October 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract As educational institutions negotiate numerous challenges resulting from the current pandemic, many are beginning to wonder what the future of education may look like. We contribute to this conversation by arguing for flexible education and considering how it can support better—more equitable, just, accessible, empowering, imaginative—educational futures. At a time of historical disorder and uncertainty, we argue that what we need is a sort of radical flexibility as a way to create life-sustaining education, not just for some, but for all, and not just for now, but far into the future. We argue that such an approach is relational, and centers justice and trust. Furthermore, we note that radical flexibility is systemic and hopeful, and requires wide-ranging changes in practices in addition to the application of new technologies. Keywords Radical flexibility . Flexible learning . Online learning . Education in crisis
Introduction We are living in times of multiple and multiplying crises, some apparently slow and later, and maybe abstract, others fast and tangible and now. In the immediacy of yesterday and today, the novel coronavirus moves quickly through some of our communities, unevenly striking folks down, disproportionately killing elderly kin, essential workers, and Black people, Indigenous people, and people of color (BIPOC). In the future, or in a place that feels like somewhere else, somewhere at least a little bit distant for now, until it does not, the crisis of the climate emergency, of biodiversity loss and extinction, of people displaced due to climate catastrophe, and of ecological collapse, moving at a pace that for many somehow registers as never too late to address—or else, something yet to be addressed, no doubt just in time.
* George Veletsianos [email protected]
1
School of Education & Technology, Royal Roads University, Victoria, Canada
850
Postdigital Science and Education (2020) 2:849–862
These two crises—the current pandemic and the climate emergency—appear to many to be distinct from each other, to be separate disasters moving at different speeds in different places. It seems that one can be addressed now, and the other later. But there is no coronavirus pandemic, at least not as we are seeing it today, without the same activities at the root of ongoing and increasingly dire climate disasters (Kolinjivadi 2020), those anthropogenically induced planetary changes so vast as to necessitate their own geologic category of the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002). The Anthropocene—the epoch characterized by the significance of human impact on our planet—is everywhere, including in our educational institutions, which are negatively impacted by the disasters that now characterize our world, while these same institutions simultaneously fail in fundamental ways to adequate
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