On the verge of a new renaissance: Care and empathy-oriented, human-centered pandemic pedagogy

Abstract

The many known and unknown consequences of the pandemic have generated not only a biological crisis but a social and psychological crisis as well. As one of the greatest global crises in recent human history, the pandemic has changed the way we perceive and interpret the world as we know it. The field of education too has had to undergo many changes as a result of the pandemic, but many lessons have been learned from the experience. In the three modes of education, we have historically gone through – from face-to-face to screen-to-screen and finally, to mask-to-mask education – we have discovered that most of our assumptions on education have been wrong. Emergency remote teaching and learning not only disrupted the education systems but also forced us to critically question the pedagogy. Accordingly, there has been a rupture in the normal, and what the new normal promises depends on the decisions we make. We could either simply return to the previous normal or create a new normal by reimagining pedagogy. The latter would require a process of learning, unlearning, and relearning the pedagogy in order to form it in its ideal shape. In this sense, we could start by defining the subject, the object and their interaction; apply asymmetric designs, and pursue a minimalist approach to pedagogy, where the goal would be to humanize pedagogy with care and empathy and reconstruct our learning ecologies with equity and social justice. This paper argues that transactional distance and affective proximity matter and aims to inspire minds to ignite the fire that will initiate an intellectual renaissance, through which we can heal the wounds of education and revive it, and as a global society, rise from the ashes, be reborn, and come back stronger in the new normal.