Can We Even Get Back to Normal? Understanding Educational Responses in (Post)Pandemic Contexts

In this essay, Corrine M. Wickens, Michael Manderino, and Sarah O’Leary-Driscoll examine impacts of the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and recent controversies, such as book bans, on education. Drawing on the sociological perspective of anomie and the scientific principle of entropy, the authors propose a framework for understanding differing reductive and productive educational responses. Anomie and entropy provide unique, but also synergistic, lenses through which to make sense of the underlying behaviors, policies, and decisions that perpetuate unjust and oppressive norms in educational spaces. Within these overarching reductive and productive responses, Wickens, Manderino, and O’Leary-Driscoll describe four dimensions–punishing, reproducing, remaking, and reimagining–and explore them through historical and contemporary examples, including book bans, attempts to do away with critical race theory, and debates over the role of social emotional learning. The article concludes by engaging with the role of pedagogical imagination, as initially espoused by Dewey and Greene and evoked by multiple critical scholars in recent calls to reimagine schools and schooling as speculative and generative. Such reimagining can help direct our individual and collective educational energies toward justice and humanity

Anomie · Critical theory · Economic Justice · Perspective (graphical) · Philosophy of education · Social justice · Sociological imagination · Critical Race Theory in Education · Digital Education and Society · Educational Philosophies and Pedagogies