COVID-19 and School Closure: Breaking with the Past and Imagining the World Anew

Pandemic-related disruptions to public education—school closures and subsequent health measures designed to mitigate risks related to COVID-19—had significant impacts on those working and learning in K–12 education systems. These disruptions, while not inconsequential to those involved, do not appear to have occasioned a meaningful shift within broader discourses about the aims and means of public education. This study, which takes a hermeneutic approach influenced by complexity studies and Indigenous research methodologies, explored the notion of educational change through the lens of curriculum reconceptualization, inquiring into the relationships between how we, as educators, attend to disruption, how we respond, and an enlarging of the space of the possible around what it means to educate and be educated. Exploring the properties of pedagogical relationships and the scale at which these properties cease to hold, this study suggests that broad-scale educational change is by nature bureaucratic or mechanistic, rather than adaptive, responsive, or relational. An interesting by-product of this inquiry was how the method itself became an object of study. Among the research participants were two retired curriculum scholars and two retired public education system leaders. My research interactions with these four individuals took on the properties of a pedagogical relationship, leading to a methodologically distinct experience of having been taught. Using this experience as a stepping off point, I discuss a pedagogical approach to conducting educational research as a potentially viable space for further study.