Writing the History of the Present
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Writing the History of the Present Petar Jandrić 1
& Sarah
Hayes 2
# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
Keywords Covid-19 . Testimonies . Photographs . Workspace . Lockdown . Postdigital .
Collective research
Teaching in the Age of Covid-19 ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19’ (Jandrić et al. 2020) presents 81 textual testimonies and 80 home workspace photographs submitted by 84 authors from 19 countries. Collected between 18 March and 5 May 2020, the testimonies and photographs describe uncanny feelings, daily experiences and challenges, and emergency solutions, developed by worldwide academics at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. Supplemented with one editor’s introduction at the beginning, and another editor’s reflections at the end, these messy and unpredictable texts and images have now obtained the form of a ‘proper’ piece of academic writing. Yet appearance deceives; as we found out early into the project, this collection can be read in many different ways. At a time when local and global surveys are contributing insights on how the move to online learning and teaching is being experienced (Watermeyer et al. 2020), we explain why this particular collection is both different, but also complementary, to other studies. Each contribution to ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19’ (Jandrić et al. 2020) is a standalone authored work, that is, both distinct and diverse. Some texts and images are small artistic masterpieces; others are more focused to the ‘scientific’ side of things; and many contributions, neither particularly artistic nor very scholarly, provide a wealth of insights into the everyday life and practice of teachers and students during the very beginning of lockdown. We have a lot of appreciation for great arts, and new ideas are * Petar Jandrić [email protected] Sarah Hayes [email protected]
1
Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia, & Education Observatory, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK
2
Education Observatory, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton, UK
Postdigital Science and Education
the bread and butter of academic inquiry. Yet ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19’ is not primarily about beautiful storytelling and/or novel ideas. As discussed elsewhere, in recent decades, the written structure of Higher Education policy texts has persistently ‘reduced the visibility of human labour by discussing the activities of academics as if these were enacted by strategies, technologies and a range of socially constructed phrases’ (Hayes 2019: 2). It is words, not people, that became repeatedly attributed with the efforts of individuals (Hayes and Jandrić 2014; Hayes 2015; Hayes 2016; Hayes and Jandrić 2017; Peters, Jandrić, and Hayes 2018). Yet a pandemic strikes, and before our eyes, each author in ‘Teaching in the Age of Covid-19’ has now begun to ‘reoccupy’ this barren textual space in Higher Education. A policy space that for far too long has provided a false, sanitized representation of academic life, generated through decades of neoliberal logic (Hay
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