In the ‘cracks’ caused by this worldwide crisis, teachers are reflecting on what can be valued most in learning.
YEAR of WONDERS:
finding the revelations in the revolution In the ‘cracks’ caused by this worldwide crisis, teachers are reflecting on what can be valued most in learning. About a week ago, a member post on my Facebook reading group reminded me of the odd synchronicities between fiction and fact. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks’ (2001) novel ‘The Year of Wonders’ is set in the plagueridden England of the 1600s; we are set amidst our own version of the pest that has caused disruption and devastation of a global scale. Similarly, just as the heroine in Brooks’ fabula finds a sense of personal revelation in the revolutionary shifts to community, society, life itself, the disruptive shifts to learning communities and education practices are a paradox: a curse and a blessing for educators. On the one hand, it has resulted in a seismic shift to school learning – catastrophically so, in the world’s unluckier quarters – at the expense of all in the school community. And yet, on the other, it has opened a crack that allows educators to explore and reframe the central tenets of what learning communities should and could be. Vulnerability is the new normal Almost immediately as the pandemic changed education delivery, educators began chronicling their own reflections: their reactions to the disaster and their predictions for the role and relationships of teaching.
Vulnerability, for some, has become socially anathema; vulnerability becomes associated with ‘helplessness’, which is anything but true. Yet teachers’ reflexive and automatic responses to ‘do more’ – borne certainly out of a vocational desire to help and support our student community – are also driven by other personal, systemic and environmental factors, not the least of which is the performative culture in which teaching as a global profession increasingly operates. New names, new identities? As an English teacher, it is my job and interest to understand language in all its shape-shifting uses in public discourse. Decades-old terms such as ‘service delivery’ and ‘performativity’ are now a well-worn part of the verbal terrain of education (Ball 2003), but teachers generally resist implications that their practice – influential academic Stephen J Ball (2003) extends this further to their ‘soul’ – can be redesignated as merely transactional. Yet through this crisis and teacher responses of professionalism, some clear public appellations are emerging: the language of the heroic, the stoic, and the ‘high performer’ is now waxing. The monikers can be both a boon and a bane. For example, Griffith University Professor Donna Prendergast’s (2020) comment on 25 May upon Queensland students’ return to school sites on the ‘newfound respect many members of the community have for teachers not only for the amazing job they do teaching the next generation but for the enabling role they play keeping the economy flowing’ is both affirming for teachers and a reminder that education is often perceived by society a high value cog in the service economy.
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Ironically, the praises and odes for educators’ alacrity and diligence that have sprung forth in the past months on Facebook feeds, celebrity shout-outs to ‘awesome’ teachers and educator leaders and advocates may themselves serve to perpetuate a mythology of the teacher ‘model performer’. In lieu of a hyperawareness of performance, academics such as
SUNATA
Appropriate to the global nature of this shift, the initial angst of change was felt globally by teachers. In the United States – struck, at the point of writing, with the world’s grimmest mortality statistics – the reverberations of change were palpable. Professor of Education at Pennsylvania State University Anne Whitney (2020) wrote on the National Council of Teachers of English official blog of the exhaustion of teachers who had reflexively jumped to ‘offer something’: solutions, extra care, extra resources, extra tutoring. She highlighted the reluctance of teachers – so inured to serve and to solve problems – to admit to their grief of change.
Kate Wiedemann Secondary Teacher
