Mapping Education in Times of Covid-19

The Comparative Education Society of India was established in 1979 and admitted to the World Council of Comparative Education Societies (WCCES) in 1980. The decision to form CESI was made in the late 1970s during a meeting in Allahabad of the Indian Association of Professors of Education.

The Society was registered in 1982 with the following objectives:

1. To promote the comparative study of education and to make social scientists and others conscious of the importance of comparative education as a science and as a subject.
2. To provide a forum for exchanging ideas on national, regional, and international aspects of education and further new research in their comparative aspects for improvement in the standard of teaching, policy making and administration of education, by organizing academic discussions, and symposia, field visits, excursions, and conferences, and by publishing journals and monographs, reviews, pamphlets and other literature.
3. To cooperate and collaborate with other societies with similar objectives in India and abroad, with official agencies and departments of Government of India and of the United Nations (including UNESCO, UNICEF, etc) and other organizations for the study of and research in comparative education and generally for advancement of the subject.

CESI 2021: Concept Note

The ongoing Covid-19 pandemic has posed a series of challenges with survival and loss of human life itself being central to it. The pandemic and its experience itself is historic in character and there has been a certain historicity of the period before Covid-19 and now with simultaneous hypervisibility and invisibility of the state. How do existing disciplines of knowledge make sense of the pandemic and its effects on different domains of life? What are the interlinkages between right to life, livelihood, work, migration, health, social security and education? How were/are they affected in the past and present? What is the language one may use to encapsulate the ‘educational loss’ that seemed to have been magnified by the multiple losses in an increasingly unequal world? In what ways, the disruptions and realignments brought by the pandemic shaped the private space of family, gendered labour and reconfigured meaning of childhood, youth and public-private boundaries?

The dominance of the sudden closure of the physical educational space, the grim reality of the educational loss, concomitant demands of shifts in methods and approaches to teaching and learning, calls for increasing reliance on digital platforms and digital inequality simultaneously mark the discourse of education and its silences at the present juncture. Even when curriculum is transacted and distributed through digital platforms in modular forms, the question of who retains and loses control over knowledge remains significant. How do we grasp the nature, continuities and shifts in education from our distinct disciplinary, institutional, spatial and social locations with awareness of the epistemic challenges involved in such an exercise? How do we understand and critically examine education at this juncture through the contradictory frames, narratives and relationships of fragmentation and consensus; public reception, legitimisation and dissent; trust and disappointment with institutions; opportunity, loss and destruction; dominance and marginality; surveillance and openness and technocratic rationality and human empathy? How has the state’s power, media and social-political movements shaped and reshaped public knowledge, identities and education amidst Covid?

CESI 2021 international conference organised in these unusual times, invites us to engage with the varied aspects of the pandemic in its relationship with education in its multiple dimensions: idea, system, knowledge, institutions, actors, policies, spaces, relationships, pedagogies and 3 practices. It also calls upon us to imagine, hope and reflect on what a post pandemic educational scenario would and should look like.

The papers and presentations in CESI virtual conference may focus on the themes outlined below:

Themes :

1. Inter-sectoral and inter-institutional linkages

• Interlinkages between right to life, livelihood, work, health and education
• Covid management strategies of State and non-state actors, their impact on educational principles, institutions and practices
• Children, young, families, covid and education
• Labour, migration and education
• Health crisis and health education
• Global disasters and the role of education

2. Education, Markets and the State

• Public financing and privatisation of education
• Technology and education: intersections, access, quality, and equity
• Democracy, covid and education
• New Public Management and cultures of accountability in education
• Social-political movements, state, dissent and public knowledge
• Reconfiguration of identities and education pre/post Covid
• Educational institutions, autonomy and choice
• Philanthropy, education and covid: before and since
• Employment, skills and learning post Covid

3. Reconfiguration of curriculum and learning

• Restructuring school education
• Global institutions, state and NGOs: new and old actors and networks in knowledge production and distribution
• Educational space, learning and Covid
• Online, remote, distance education and its effects, experience
• Pandemic, inequalities and education
• Modular and commodified education
• Digital surveillance and its impact of teaching and learning process
• Learning outcomes and assessment
• Pedagogy in times of online education and Covid

4. Teacher, teaching and Covid

• Teaching as labour and profession: before and during Covid
• Security, vulnerability and contractualisation of teachers
• Teaching as site of reform and transformation
• Teacher education
• Online classrooms and teachers’ autonomy
• Socio-emotional learning, counselling and teachers