Re-setting education: lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s education was felt throughout the world, and there was significant pressure to return to normal. The acceptability of the supposedly normal has, however, been challenged by Ladson-Billings and others who have called for a re-set of education, much as one would treat a malfunctioning computer. This article draws on findings from a two-year project, Education RESET: Renewal, tEchnologies and Solidarity for Education FuTures, involving ethnographic methods including participant observation, interviews and focus groups with teachers and school leaders in two countries—Malaysia and Italy. The article reports the experiences of the teachers and leaders who resisted the normal and sought to practise differently. These different practices involved: Affecting pleasures: engaging with students’ desires: Relating better: remaking informal inclusion, Othering: refusing categorisation and Changing spaces: shifting governance in schools. Assemblage theory and method assembly were used to interpret these practices and to recognise them as a series of movements—centring desire, getting closer to the students, pushing categories to the margins and decentring teachers’ and leaders’ selves. The findings and subsequent analysis illustrate possibilities for refusing the return to normal and for finding alternative and better educational futures.