Pandemic Education
Pandemic Education

Summary/Abstract: Pandemic education refers not only to how we educate ourselves and others about the pandemic, but also – and more importantly – to how the pandemic educates us. And how does it do so? Firstly, it educates us by being a threat that we cannot ignore. Whereas we think that we can ignore the threat of climate change, we cannot ignore the pandemic because it strikes at our very bodies, thereby making its invisible threat very real. It warns us: You are not immune. Secondly, it educates us by being something that threatens all of us – as the origin of the term in the Greek pandemos, ‘pertaining to all people; public, common,’ suggests. While we are enculturated to see ourselves as individual agents, the pandemic demands that we act collectively to nurture what we have in common. It warns us: You are not alone. Thirdly, it educates us by being a threat to human life as we think of it. It brings home to us how we are hosts, for example, to viruses, including those that come from other species, but, more than that, how we are not only human but also more-than-human. Our ‘we’ extends into what we like to call ‘nature’ or ‘matter,’ and into the past and future. It warns us: You are not who you think you are. So if how we teachers educate has changed a lot as a result of the pandemic – for example, we have had to learn by ourselves how to teach online and just-in-time – the education that the pandemic offers us has the potential to change us immeasurably.

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