87. Not Returning To Normal: Examining and Contesting Power in the COVID-19 Era
Jesse Bazzul, University of Regina; Matthew Weinstein, Univ. Of Washington-Tacoma; John Lawrence Bencze, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto
Posted: February 28, 2022 Accepted Languages: English/Inglés/Inglês
How can we as an educational and research community apprehend, analyze, and critique the politics of COVID-19 articulated through science education. How do we as a community develop public and institutional forms that make sense of COVID and its educational significance? During the epidemic(s) of 2020 and 2021 and 2022 schools and universities became major sites of concern over the disease’s spread as well as the ‘loss’ of education and the material, social, and emotional supports schools provide. Epidemiological discourse and science models filled countless pages of media providing a virtual public pedagogy of the disease. As part of its traditional role formal science education discourses of sanitation. In this sense, both traditional media and science education co-developed as normalizing forces and extensions of public health, as figured by the state, with all of its inherent problems (e.g., unequal effects of its public health measures by gender, race and class). The heightened precarity of certain groups in public health regimes immediately became apparent in the initial stages of the pandemic, but so too were the capitalist dynamics of health interventions. When politicians speak of returning schools to norms, they are speaking of returning schools to the human capital functions of modern schools, of which STEM is central. It is this narrative of science education as usual that this panel seeks to disrupt. To, as it were, not return to normal! We invite those interested in COVID politics and educational practices (K-12 and higher education) to submit to this panel.
