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Beyond Covid-19

Image on a black background of a very large, green and uneven viruscell covered in yellow protrusive spots. Above the cell it says BEYOND COVID-19 in the gradient colour scheme from green to yellow

Beyond Covid

Although the world-encompassing pandemic outbreak in 2020 caused widespread disruption all over the world, school leaders and teachers in Sweden found themselves almost completely exempt from this alteration during 2020 as schools remained open throughout this difficult period for all Swedish students up to the age of 16, not just those of essential workers.1 Notwithstanding debates about the strategy adopted by the Swedish Public Health Agency to flatten the curve of rising infections without a complete lockdown, schools all around the country quickly adapted to a new reality, where voluntary individual confinement forced teachers to develop different hybrid teaching methods, such as blended learning, where distance teaching and in-school learning took place simultaneously.

The Pandemic’s Impact on Mental Health

A young woman squats down in front of a large brick wall. She covers her face with her hands and her elbows are on her knees. She is wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt and she has dark brown hair below her shoulders. She is looking depressed.

Depressed girl by brick wall

Attribution: U3143168, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The crisis created a sense of insecurity and severe unease in many people all over the world. Indicators from the Opinions and Lifestyle Survey about the impact of the coronavirus and the social effects on young people in Great Britain showed that “one of their biggest worries was the impact on schools and universities, in particular being unable to attend them, the quality of their education and uncertainty around exams. While they were more optimistic, young people were much more likely to report being bored and lonely during the lockdown period, and 42% of them reported that it was making their mental health worse.”2 In addition, the exponential growth of ideologically driven disinformation online has made it difficult for many countries to contain the spread of the virus. The proliferation of baseless conspiracy theories on the Internet is a powerful illustration of the failure of many governments in providing a quality education that equips the population with adequate critical thinking skills. Addressing mental health issues and increasing a capacity to develop a fine understanding of the scientific process while educating the population to be aware of their own cognitive biases and logical fallacies are undoubtedly some of the most important educational challenges of the post-Covid-19 era in many countries around the world.

A line graph on a black background with the text in green, yellow and white depicting the Dunning-Kruger effect. The vertical scale represents "confidence level", from low at the bottom to high at the top. The horizontal scale represents "level of knowledge", from low on the left to high on the right. The line starts at the bottom: "no understanding, no confidence". On the second measuring point the line has shot up to the top with "I know everything, I did my own research". At the third measuring point the line has fallen back about a third of the way down "There is more to this than I thought". At the fourth measuring point the line has dropped even further, but not quite all the way down to the bottom with "I'm never going to understand this". At the fifth measuring point the line has risen only slightly with "It starts to make sense". At the sixth and final measuring point the line has risen to about two thirds of the way up with "Trust me, it's complicated".

Dunning Kruger Effect

The Challenge of a New Normal

In this section, we would like to continue the discourse about the challenge of entering the ‘new normal’ globally and will attempt to envision how educators and policy-makers might make use of this opportunity for improved reconstruction with new opportunities for schools and businesses leading into what might become something of a New Normal. We now find ourselves in an era where, in the words of Sir Ken Robinson, “Next” is our only option.3 Reports from many European countries as well as the USA during 2020 proclaimed that office workers and their employers alike no longer wished to go back to pre-pandemic use of office space and office hours.4 If the office workers of the future can enjoy a more flexible and malleable work situation, then perhaps schools can also further develop more integrated and flexible distanced or blended education, where this is considered most favourable. “Before the pandemic, the conventional wisdom had been that offices were critical to productivity, culture, and winning the war for talent. Companies competed intensely for prime office space in major urban centres around the world, and many focused on solutions that were seen to promote collaboration.”5 Equally we might assert that even though classroom settings have traditionally been thought of as critical to a successful education, in this book we have explored several ideas contributing to the discussion about the need to finally radically change education practices in the post-Covid-19 era.

The question now is how education will successfully be able to move forward after the crisis while learning the most important lessons from both the immediate and more distant past, and if there will be major national differences or if our combined contemporary educational knowledge now is global and universal, or if national divergences are substantial enough for us not to be able to take the same path moving forward, despite educational research currently being predominantly international.

Reorganising Educational Resources

In this chapter, we will discuss what lessons can be learnt from the experiences of schools and educators from all over the world going through the perils of the pandemic. Is the development of distance education potentially the way of the future or to what extent do students need each other's company to develop the skills they need when they are older? Another query is what abilities they cannot develop alone or in a distanced learning environment? According to Setiawan, “It is hoped that distance learning will maintain the learning process of scientific literacy in different ways and levels.”6 The question that remains is if this desired outcome will be reached in a long-term perspective.

Photograph with an open computer at the center. To the left of the computer is a metal coffee cup, and to the right a small portable speaker. The image on the computer screen is that of a girl in a face-mask holding up her maths home-work, consisting of many sums on a white sheet of paper, for the viewer to see.

Beyond Covid online class

Attribution: Composite image of two Public Domain pictures: rawpixel, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons and ibone, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons (no attribution needed in the eResources because of the CC0)

In the context of trying to promote more hands-on and active learning activities, what would a completely digitised learning experience entail? Will we ever return to the traditional forms of teaching, where students listen to a lecture in a classroom? Will school days continue to be as long as in the past? Or will the schools’ schedules of the future be much more flexible? Would it be possible to achieve even more sustainable learning with new and more interactive digital resources? And, perhaps most crucial of all, in what way do we need to adapt our digital resources to better suit an entirely or partly distanced learning environment? Young children will most likely still need the childcare that school provides; they need to be looked after, so that their parents can work or fulfil other obligations. Schools can also provide the essential developmental skills of socialisation or the development of the child’s social competence. Furthermore, younger children most likely need stimulation of their senses that is not limited to computer screens or tablets; hands-on and playful learning activities are essential for their development.

  1. https://sverigesradio.se/artikel/7463747.
  2. For survey results, see https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/ageing/articles/coronavirusandthesocialimpactsonyoungpeopleingreatbritain/3aprilto10may2020.
  3. Robinson, K., Finding your element, Penguin Books, 2013, p.227.
  4. See, for example, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/05/business/pandemic-work-from-home-coronavirus.html.
  5. According to https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/reimagining-the-office-and-work-life-after-covid-19#.
  6. Setiawan, A., Scientific Literacy Worksheets for Distance Learning in the Topic of Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19), EdArXiv, 15 April 2020.