Post _Covid- The New Normal


 In my first post, I mentioned the new normal in post-covid time.  The pandemic struck the world at a time of digitization, and technology applications slowly aiding classroom pedagogy.  Its hold took a longer stay made it necessary for the politicians and educationists world over to speed up this, not having the patience and time to look into its benefit and drawbacks.  

The digitisation enhanced digital gadget markets, an added advantage when the normal job markets are shrinking. And it increased the digital divide: many learners from both developed and developing nations cannot afford the gadgets lost in the limbo of uncertainty.  The governments alone, or through private partnerships, were pressed to find the funding to address the shortages by buying new devices.  

It was a mix of good and bad. Parents, learners, teachers and everyone in education got a new digital pride- have achieved a digital status, got modernized, and such things.  I have met parents and grandparents during my visit to Kerala, taking pride in their children doing the basic cellphone things and predicting they become computer engineers.  They know that money matters; getting an engineering degree to get a job overseas is money.  

Means technology education is money and status.  In that way, though the pandemic spread calamities, it has speeded up technologizing the youngsters' learning, it brings some happiness.  Those who cannot afford the gadgets are upset, already sidelined in the developmental equation, are getting further pushed backwards.  Anyway, they were already backward, so they can be backward again; some find good with that logic.

But what about knowledge?  

This question is answered based on the essay "The 'new normal, in education by Jose Augusto Pacheco. 

'Is learning from the digital screen imparting knowledge as is globally defined. "Digital technologies and economic rationality based on performance are significant determinants of the commercialisation of learning.  Moving from physical face-to-face presence to virtual contact (synchronous and asynchronous), the learning space becomes disembodied, virtual, not actual impacting both student learning and the organisation of schools, which are no longer buildings but websites."  It is also not in agreement with the accepted meaning of education, lifelong learning to know, learning to do, learning to be and learning to live together.  In digital learning, there is no knowledge constructed; information gets passed on. 

The new-normal in the post-covid should be planned with a new vision in the curriculum.

The post-covid curriculum can "seize the opportunity of achieving a responsive, ethical, human education, one which requires a humanistic and internationally aware conceptualisation of curriculum."

The essay concludes like this: "Yes, we need to linger and take time to contemplate the curriculum question. Only in this way will we share what is common and distinctive in our experience of the current pandemic by changing our time and learning to foreclose on our future. Curriculum conceived as a complicated conversation restarts historical, not screen time; it enacts the private and public as distinguishable, not fused in a computer screen.  That is the "new normal."


Post No.9, this is part of the BlogChatter Half Marathon

Here is Post no.8







Comments

  1. We need to revamp the teaching-learning process in the post-pandemic world. No, now itself.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You're absolutely right, it should have already been there. And because it's not there, the reminder continues.

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