Category Archives: Viral Pedagogies

Viral Pedagogies

Community within Viral Times

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Nicole Land

We have spent the last two months working at reading the context of each COVID classroom – and feeling the power, dismay, and irregularity in referring to classrooms for their context amid ongoing pandemic ebbs and flows. It feels strange – and maybe it always should – to ask “what matters in this classroom in viral times?”. This is a question of method (how do we pay attention differently during viral times?) as much as it is of curriculum-making (how do we participate with children in the crafting of a relevant, meaningful, ever shape-shifting curriculum in dialogue with viral worlds?). Since a thread of this project is to imagine how we might collaborate digitally when our researcher and educator co-researcher bodies cannot physically meet in the same room, we have been experimenting with keeping what we are calling a “Running Chat”; a Google Doc where we put our writing-on-the-move and note connections or dwell in the disjunctures of what we notice differently in education spaces right now. We gathered over Zoom this week to re-turn, to revisit, what we have written so far in the Running Chat and to look toward some concepts that we want to work at for the last few months of our viral pedagogies project (although we know the project will live well past the day our funding runs empty). What is emerging for us is a profound focus on community-making as a question of living well together: how do we come together now? How do we think about creating more livable worlds and community together with children in viral times, when we are in and of COVID worlds?

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Viral Pedagogies

Viral Pedagogies

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Nicole Land

Speaking of the uncertain work of returning to pedagogical inquiry work, we asked in our last blog – posted almost one year ago – questions of how to pick pedagogical inquiry research back up from within the mess of the COVID pandemic, where however we make choices to proceed, these choices implicate us in viral worlds; worlds that either yearn for a return to the status quo, spaces that refuse a reiteration of what was and seek the otherwise, or moments that sit in the muck between then and now, between what was and what might happen. We asked: what might we do with the stories, histories, experiments, speculations, reflections, and moments that animated our pre-pandemic work in the face of COVID? And more importantly – how? How do we pay attention to the concepts COVID riddles, where the act of returning is one of answering and care? How do we tune to and move with ethics and politics differently, in dialogue with the enduring traces COVID continues to etch on (our, other, children’s, more-than-human) bodies?

We return now with a ‘new’ (as in unfamiliar, as in grounded in these times here and now – not new as in never engaged before, nor new in the sense that it is made of purely inventive energy) project that we are calling Crafting Pedagogies with(in) Suspension: Viral Pedagogies in COVID times in Early Childhood Education. We will continue to blog about this project here, with Moving Pedagogies, because we want to build an active archive of all the iterations of our work together. All of our work particular to the Viral Pedagogies project will be categorized as such, should a reader want to focus more on this work than Moving Pedagogies, although we will take no pains to separate the two projects that share a bloodline, that have bodies and spaces and worlds in common.

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Viral Pedagogies, Weaving together questions

Returning

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Nicole Land
(this image is of my COVID kitty, Caper. Her excitement at learning that pigeons exist, as shown in this picture, feels like a good start to this post)

Along the left hand side of this page, WordPress has made for us a modest lexicon for our Moving Pedagogies work. You might need to scroll down – look for “tags” – and there you will find a roving and running vocabulary that nourishes our thinking with moving: being implicated, bordermaking, care-full, collective, death, ethics, materials, moving with, noticing, ownership, pausing, relations, responding, walking slowly. More a purposefully chaotic thesaurus than a glossary, these words that form the ever dexterous spine of our work to think about moving and pedagogy orient toward reading and wording practices concerned with tangles, overlaps, affinities, and questions. With the crisp surprise of the right synonym, the charm of a concept that shares a dwelling but that dances along the surfaces of that home with a different rhythm, this lexicon names questions of moving well together. It is not prescriptive; it adopts neither the hunt for definition that a dictionary might embody nor the indexing or cataloguing function of a glossary. What this automatically-collected array of concepts does ask of us is to remember that these words are moments and concepts. They are happenings, gatherings, collisions; these words are glued to our pedagogical intentions and commitments, and they are the glue that loses its stickiness in the name of continually calling us to return to the pedagogical contours of the moments that make a concept.

Returning is where we launch from now. It has been almost two years since our last blog post here. I would love to blame COVID-19 but that is not fair. A virus cannot dissolve a thesaurus; a pandemic can amplify proximities, both near and far, but it cannot stop the movement – the tumbles over and over and over – of concepts that are secretly questions. What our viral times can compel of us is to return, knowing that now, returning is not an act of nostalgia nor retreat but one of gentle confrontation as we ask of our lexicon: what can we do together now, here? How can we re-learn how to pay attention to the practices that manifest you, in your specificity, while also learning to notice how urgency has shifted to name different vital concerns? How do we return to these concepts that felt so acutely meaningful that we couldn’t put them down, that lived in our endlessly long email chains and our jotted down notes, and that we thought together with children, noticing how this lexicon began to take shape within and across our common and uncommon places and spaces again as we return?

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