Teaching and learning in uncertain times: thinking with multiple crises

Abstract

Teachers are working in disturbing and challenging times, characterised by coterminous crises, the Covid-19 pandemic and human induced climate change; these are transforming our working conditions and the lives of students and teachers. In this research, we looked to our own pedagogical practices as teacher educators to collaboratively explore what it means to be teachers and learners in uncertain times of multiple crises. We use a collaborative autoethnographic methodology to better understand the kind of educator these times demand and consider the implications for teacher education. Through fictionalised, co-constructed vignettes that act as pedagogical encounters, we explore our collaborative experiences in relation to multiple crises: in the classroom, at climate strikes, and in conversations with teachers during the pandemic. We use these vignettes to think with and through teaching during the global pandemic and the climate catastrophe, and with young people’s climate activism. Thinking with these vignettes, we analyse the ways (young) people across the world were already creating and are continuing to create, prefiguratively, different possible futures through public and ‘everyday’ modes of political action for climate justice, and what this might mean for teacher education.