[PeDAGoG] How can marginalised communities continue learning in times of Covid?

Thu Jul 2 23:27:05 CEST 2020

Dear all,

Ever since the Corona pandemic has forced schools, colleges and universities to temporarily close, there has been much talk about how to ensure continuous learning for students. While there is a lot to say about how this again conflates (mainstream) 'education' (school, college, academia) with 'learning,' erroneously assuming that the latter stops magically and automatically once we step outside the boundaries of educational institutions, I want to focus your attention on another, related aspect:

how can we ensure that marginalised communities and less privileged people are able to continue their learning? For middle class students, the physical classroom has just shifted to the virtual one and classroom lectures are being replaced with online monologues, with even less relevance for students and their current lives, instead of seeing it as a chance to learn with families and communities and about families and communities. For less privileged people however, the effort (however misguided in first place) to provide them education has completely stopped as they have no access to technology, resources etc.

Instead, it seems that it is widely assumed that for marginalised communities, the bare survival during the pandemic is all that counts, while other things such as education and learning are not seen as relevant anymore during this time. That's why we at Project DEFY have started a new programme called FLITE - Families Learning Together, which is a state-of-the-art low-tech, telephonic programme based on discussion, exploring, learning and creating together with families from the communities we work with. To find out more about the programme, please have a look at this website where we pitched our idea, although we did not get selected in the end 😉: https://challenges.openideo.com/challenge/covid-reimagine-learning-challenge/ideas/flite-families-learning-together

Which brings me to the final part of my email - are there any other suggestions, either building on the FLITE programme or completely new ideas, how we can ensure that learning for the less privileged doesn't stop in times of Covid? What initiatives that actually reach marginalised communities can we take, and how can they go beyond the typical classroom-based experience irrelevant for most of people's lives and address their actual interests, needs and ambitions?

Best and take care,
Christoph

Latest Publications:

The Ontological Politics of (In-)Equality: A new research approach for post-development, Third World Quarterly, (2019): https://bit.ly/2YaFHU0

The Deep Marketisation of Development in Bangladesh, Third World Quarterly, (2017), 38 (7): http://ow.ly/OjWW305Jkua
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