Covid and Higher Education

Abstract

Ensuring that learning is participatory and even further democratized seems particularly important at a time when people are kept apart because of a Covid pandemic that thrives on proximity. Whilst learning is based on exchanges, it also benefits from the existence of a learning community, the access to which needs to be equal and taking account of learners’ diversity. How is Higher Education equipping itself to adapt to new learning conditions? How can it ensure that it can meet new types of needs? To address these questions, a workshop was organized at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research on Education and Development (CeiED), Lisbon, on an emerging area of research called ‘Citizen Science’. Citizen Science has been gaining popularity in many disciplines. Here, we are interested in how it could help to improve education and learning, as well as how current research in education might also help approaches in Citizen Science to move forward. Reflections on theory were carried out in parallel with a one-day practical online workshop on ‘operationalizing Citizen Science’, involving researchers in the center’s three areas – education, museology, and urbanism. This article explains the outcomes of this event.