Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE) - Volume 22 - Issue 1 - Special Issue 2020 - Education post-‘Covid-19’: Re-visioning the face-to-face classroom

Oct 15, 2026

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Essay from Current Issues in Comparative Education examines how the Covid-19 shutdown of face-to-face classrooms reshapes educational thinking. It argues that online environments create a new vantage for revisiting educational ideals and the purposes of schooling, echoing Hannah Arendt’s insistence on returning to questions during crisis. The piece considers AI’s potential to further transform learning and highlights both the limits of virtual communication feedback loops and the continuing value of relational, multi-sensory face-to-face pedagogy.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages4

Reading Time10 min

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Education post-‘Covid-19’: Re-visioning the face-to-face classroom

Crisis, online vantage, and returning to questions

AI, changing literacies, and educational purposes

Limits of virtual communication and re-structuring face-to-face pedagogy

Current Issues in Comparative Education (CICE) Volume 22, Issue 1, Special Issue 2020 Education post-‘Covid-19’: Re-visioning the face-to-face classroom Paul Tarc University of Western Ontario For better and worse, the Covid-19 crisis will necessarily advance a number of instrumental responses for online education under the global shutdown of face-to-face classrooms. Unfortunately, it will also be employed as ‘shock doctrine’ (Klein, 2007) to advance a much more aggressive move to online education that would be hardly possible in more normal times, but that is a different story. Covid-19 has accelerated but did not begin the move to online education. Artificial intelligence (AI) will take us even further as new technologies not only deliver text, audio and visuals but interactively engage with student learning processes and do so across longer periods of the learner’s development. How AI will or might transform education, also, is another paper. This essay asks its readers to consider the online environment and the shutdown of face-to-face (f2f) classrooms as a condition that represents a new vantage for thinking, and particularly so for re-imagining and perhaps re-visioning f2f pedagogies. Beyond coping and learning anew under these changes, might we consider the dramatic crisis as a new vantage from which to better understand educational ideals, those we hold to and those we have yet to fully develop? As the eminent political philosopher Hannah Arendt (2006/1954, p. 171) reminds us, in times of crisis or dramatic transformation we must not forget that “the answers”we normally rely on, were originally answers to questions. As actors working inside institutions, we will no doubt spend considerable energy tweaking‘old answers’ to adapt them to the changing conditions brought about by the move to online education. However, as Arendt warns us, most important in a crisis is to return to the questions themselves. In education, this approach would press us to rethink educational idealsin light of changing technologies and changing human literacies. Our movements out of f2f teaching, thus, represent a‘vantage’ from which to view and re-assess what education (and the human) is or might be. With an immersive experience in a foreign country we (may) learn about the geography, language and culture of the new country. However, the most profound learning, the transformative shift, is constituted in the de-naturalizing of internalized assumptions produced in our own culture and norms (Tarc, 2013) . Similarly, ‘seeing’ from the online vantage can lessen our grip on‘the answers’and “forces us back to the questions themselves”(Arendt, 2006/1954, p. 171), in this case, on the purposes or essence of education under contemporary conditions. Rather than (only) lamenting upon how our methods are constrained in new teaching environments, we might discover altered and more generative purposes for education in our current worldly conditions, which guide us to transformed pedagogies in the formerly taken-for-granted‘bubble’of the f2f classroom. Rethinking educational aims and pedagogies in light of changing conditions is a demanding endeavor, both challenge and opportunity. And it is also important to keep in mind that the current limits and possibilities of online education are inflected © 2020, Current Issues in Comparative Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Current Issues in Comparative Education 22(1), 121-124. Education post-‘Covid-19’ by already existing f2f environments, learning, relationships and identities. Online enthusiasts leverage this condition to suggest that the advanced technologies are not the problem, but the slow-to-change mindsets of educators beholden to f2f settings. But the converse is also true here and much less acknowledged. We must also understand that current successes, so to speak, of online teaching may be supported by or founded on prior f2f interactions. Just as

FAQs

What limitations of virtual classrooms does the author highlight?

The author points to reduced multi-sensory communication and diminished feedback loops, including weaker access to body language, facial expressions, and spontaneous engagement.

Oct 15, 2026

Upload by nayy☆