Pedagogy of scale: Unmastering time, teaching and living through crises

Abstract

What does it mean to teach, live, and imagine one’s futures amidst a global pandemic? How to respond to the reality of unequal and overlapping crises, COVID-19 being one of them? Can alternative understandings of time help us create a more just post-pandemic university? Drawing on environmental humanities, disaster and critical time studies, in conversation with qualitative data, this article theorizes a ‘pedagogy of scale’: a practical and conceptual centering on multiple temporalities and diverse interpretative frames. The analysis argues for the need to attend to overlapping, non-linear, and changeable scales of time, reference, and meaning that students draw on in order to make sense of crises: every crisis, even as unprecedented as COVID-19, is embedded in environmental processes, long-term vulnerabilities and injustices. These overlooked and overlapping scales interweave personal, planetary, and theological notions of time—from ecological deep time to the divine time—meaning, and self. In its focus on asynchronicity, overlap and multiplicity, the analysis extends current theorizations of temporality and crisis in higher education, challenges paradigms of mastery, advocates for epistemic plurality, and embraces decolonial notions of human subjectivity, providing a much-needed critical model for the post-pandemic university.

Keywords:

• Crisis
• COVID-19
• pedagogy
• time
• futures

Disclosure statement

The author does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Notes

1 See Mika, 2019, pp. 1-32, esp. footnote 70 (p.28) for an overview of developments in disaster and, later, postcolonial disaster studies and their emphasis on understanding disaster as a process, not an event. Similarly, Beckett (2020) argues for a repositioning of crisis as an ordinary disaster (2020, p. 80) and the importance of attending to, what he terms, “the atmosphere of crisis”: “something more than the structural conditions that both effect and affect people’s lives, the conditions that give rise not just to disaster or tragedy but also to political affects—feelings-about crisis, life, and everything in between” (2020, p.81). The analysis here follows these two respective emphasises on process, ordinariness and affect.

2 Most UK universities transitioned to online learning in March/April 2020, immediately after a nationwide trade union strike, and continued online provision throughout the whole of the 2020/21 academic year. Despite the easing of COVID restrictions, many leading UK HEIs still include a mix provision of online lectures and face-to-face seminars with some going as far as to stipulate a concurrent ‘hyper-flex’ or ‘mixed-mode’ learning modes with synchronous teaching of students both in the classroom and online.

3 November 2020; 3^rd year elective course on environmental humanities (2020/21 academic year), anonymous mid-semester informal module questionnaire (registered students = 20; respondents =7)

4 October 2020, 1^st year core course (20/21 academic year; registered students= 44; respondents =25); mid-semester anonymous online questionnaire.

5 November 2020; 3^rd year elective course on environmental humanities (2020/21 academic year), anonymous mid-semester informal module questionnaire (registered students = 20; respondents =7).

6 October 2020, 1^st year core course (20/21 academic year; registered students = 44; respondents = 25); mid-semester anonymous online questionnaire

7 October 2020; 3^rd year elective course on environmental humanities (2020/21 academic year), anonymous mid-semester informal online module questionnaire (registered students = 20; respondents =7).

8 October 2020; (students registered = 44; respondents = 25); anonymous written mid-semester online questionnaire.

9 March 2021; 1^st year module (students registered = 44; respondents total = 11); anonymous written mid-semester online questionnaire.

10 March 2021; 1^st year module (students registered = 44; respondents total = 11); anonymous written mid-semester online questionnaire.

11 This is all the more visible in the current debates on (eliminating) ‘low-value courses’ that do not meet the continuation, completion, and progression benchmarks set by the Office for Students. Here, the time and money ‘’invested’ in the degree (synonymous with the tuition fees and student loan debt) is meant to pay off (in terms of the ability to pay the student loan back), again in monetary terms.

12 October 2020; 3^rd year elective course on environmental humanities (2020/21 academic year), anonymous mid-semester informal module questionnaire (students registered = 20; responses = 7)

13 April 2020; 1^st year in class online discussion.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kasia Mika-Bresolin

Kasia Mika-Bresolin is a Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature (Queen Mary University of London). She works at the intersection of environmental humanities, postcolonial and Caribbean studies, and critical pedagogy. She’s the author of Disasters, Vulnerability, and Narratives: Writing Haiti’s Futures and published in Third Text, Modern & Contemporary France; The Journal of Haitian Studies; Area; Moving Worlds.