Organising the labour of teaching and learning during the COVID-19 pandemic in Canadian universities

Abstract

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian university responses reflected governing practices related to teaching and learning in university systems. This study aims to interrogate responses from three Canadian universities related to discourses formed around the labour of teaching and learning. Using a post-structural approach to policy analysis that assumes that realities emerge in practices, our research question asks: how do the policy responses about teaching and learning represent academic labour during the pandemic? In this article, we argue that labour became constituted through two main discourses of ‘safety/security’ and ‘the return to normal’. We conclude that the importance of these two different representations lies in how they influence the constitutions of faculty and students as different policy subjects.