No. 22 (12): Education and pandemic. Educational practices and challenges in times of COVID-19. January-June 2021

In recent weeks society as a whole has experienced multiple challenging circumstances due to the SARS-CoV-2 virus, which has not only created a worldwide health problem but also disrupted (perhaps irreversibly) social aspects as encompassing and fundamental as the economy, trade, tourism and, of course, education. These changes have implied, among other things, new educational challenges to address the need to prevent the spread of the disease by staying home while at the same continue offering and developing educational activities and processes at all levels of education.

The COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled and put to the test all the operational, technological and pedagogical capabilities of almost every educational system around the world. This has led especially to the need to rethink and develop academic activities through the use of virtual environments and multiple technologies by teachers and students. Staying home has meant migrating from traditional classrooms to the most widely diverse virtual and digital spaces, times, interfaces, and rationales.

This transit and adaptation of educational practices to digital environments invites us to recognize this historical opportunity to understand education through other perspectives that acknowledge the new meanings and practices that technologies and culture have for some time now driven us towards, and that have come to the foreground with the pandemic. This de-centering of education does not only imply spatial and temporal transformations of learning processes, but also entails the challenge of acknowledging and solving the gaps that have opened or grown between the actors of education.

These are some of the questions that may help us to understand the current situation in the realm of education: How profound has the transformation of education been, and how have the different entities of society dealt with the urgency of an education beyond the traditional environments? What kind of pedagogical and technological implementations are being used as alternative solutions? What are the gaps between those who have technical access and competencies and those who do not? It is time now to start imagining and thinking how the pandemic will affect education in the near future.

Issue Coordinator: José Manuel Corona-Rodríguez