Taking ‘school’ home in the COVID-19 era: a Foucauldian analysis of the pivot to remote teaching and learning

Abstract

Worldwide, over the course of the global COVID-19 pandemic, major disruption to schooling presented governments, school leaders, teachers, parents, and pupils with a host of challenges. These challenges also brought increased attention to how ill-prepared schools were to ‘pivot’ from face-to-face teaching and learning to online forms of remote schooling. While much attention has been paid to educational recovery programmes by governments, very little attention has been paid to the impact that the pivot to remote learning had on pupils more generally and families specifically. This article aims to explore the impact of the ‘pivot’ to remote teaching and learning on pupils and their families through the prism of social theory, specifically a Foucauldian perspective using his ‘trident’ of problematization, critique and skepticism that provides the framework of our exposition of the topic as it is presented in the literature. We envisage to open up a discussion among the various competing discourses of post-pandemic school reform that are circulating in policy, practice, and scholarship.