Learning to Resist and Resisting Learning

Bibliographic Data

ID5936052
AuthorsJill Bradbury (0000-0001-9696-9956, University of the Witwatersrand, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume11
Issue7
Pages277
Publication date2022-06-27
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSocial Sciences (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0760 • E-ISSN: 2076-0760
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/socsci11070277
OpenAlexW4283660695
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited14

The COVID crisis has disrupted routine patterns and practices across all spheres of everyday life, rupturing social relations and destabilising our capacity for building coherent selves and communities by recollecting the past and imagining potential futures. Education is a key domain in which these hopes for the future have been dashed for many young people and in which commitments to critical scholarship and pedagogies are being contested. In a world of stark socioeconomic inequality, racism, and other forms of dehumanising othering, the pandemic serves not to disrupt narratives of meritocracy and progress but to expose them as the myths they have always been. This paper will explore forms of political resistance and the (im)possibilities for experimental pedagogies in response to the broken promises and unrealised dreams of (higher) education in the context of the COVID crisis. Reflecting on my own everyday life as a scholar and educator in a South African university, and in dialogue with students' narratives of experience, I will examine the ways in which the experience of the pandemic has released and mobilised new forms of resistance to historical institutional and pedagogical practices. However, these hopeful threads of alternative narratives are fragile, improvised in the weighty conditions of a status quo resistant to change, and in which the alienation and inequality of the terrain are being exacerbated and deepened through a proliferation of bureaucratic and technicist solutions

Aesthetics · Context (archaeology · Meritocracy · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Racism · Resistance (ecology · Scholarship · Sociology · Status quo · Children's Rights and Participation · Gender Studies · Higher Education Practises and Engagement · History · Youth Education and Societal Dynamics

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