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.
Highlights
We are living in times of multiple and multiplying crises, some apparently slow and later, and maybe abstract, others fast and tangible and
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 characterize our world, while these same institutions simultaneously fail in fundamental ways to adequately grapple with their role in its perpetuation
It means that those with power, namely privileged faculty and administrators—and the institutions they work within— cannot treat one group in a system relationally while managing another as cogs in a machine. This creates a divide between those who are treated as human beings and those who are not, thereby undermining attending to relationality itself. What this pandemic makes abundantly clear is the pressing need not just to build resilient and adaptable ways of designing, developing, and delivering education, and to subvert the marriage of capitalism and postdigital education in order for education to become a place for the practice of freedom
Summary
We are living in times of multiple and multiplying crises, some apparently slow and later, and maybe abstract, others fast and tangible and now. What we are bearing witness to —not just the rapid transition in February and March of 2020, and the use of online and hybrid options for Fall 2020 and beyond—is flexible digital education deployed in haste, driven by an immediate need to adapt to rapid changes in delivery, namely as suddenly other than face-to-face, all amidst the threat and uncertainty of a widely circulating, poorly understood pathogen It is in this specific ongoing context, set against the backdrop of the existential crisis of the climate emergency, that a certain kind of flexible education should emerge, one capable of addressing the crisis at hand and those on the horizon. & How to do so without minimizing the under-critiqued and underthought tendencies and mechanisms of flexible education?
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