Opinion: Covid-19 has added huge anxieties on students but they are far more engaged and committed to thinking critically and shaping a better world than they are given credit for.
"They were reared right" is a phrase familiar to many Irish people. It is one I have been reflecting on a lot of late, in embarking upon my own journey with a young family, but also in thinking about the task of nurturing, and safeguarding the future more broadly, in the context of university teaching during the pandemic.
Covid-19 has added huge anxieties on students, and has rendered their university experience socially limited in all kinds of ways. We need to advocate strongly for their mental health support in particular.
Indeed, given the range of challenges they face in virtual learning, and the social isolation they palpably feel, they could be forgiven for veering towards apathy and inertia. On the whole, however, that is not what I have seen.
One of the upshots of virtual pedagogy for me during the pandemic has been the increased number of one-to-one online meetings with my students. These have given me an acute sense of hope for the future. Although not referenced enough, students today are far more engaged and committed to thinking critically and shaping a better world than they are given credit for.
Below I outline just three of the ways in which their resolve and application, even in the midst of our ongoing lockdowns, can be seen in higher education, and why that is promissory of a more optimistic future.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From Radio 1's Morning Ireland, the phenomenon of online learning explored: Amy Ní Riada explores one of the newer online learning sites based in Kilkenny.
Curiosity
In Colum McCann's TransAtlantic, he eloquently captures the essence of curiosity: "a fascination with the swerve of the world". A curiosity for the world is important now more than ever.
My students are rightly astonished as to why we have incessantly heard about what we must all do on an individual level to prevent the spread of COVID-19, whilst governments and the mainstream media across the globe have failed utterly to address the underlying political economy and political ecology reasons for its emergence.
They are curious too about why we are not strategising to mitigate against the outbreak of future pandemics, why we are not planning for and resourcing a prioritised vision of transnational and cooperative health security, and why we are not activating existing global conventions on the far-reaching environmental stresses of unregulated capitalism.
Curiosity for understanding the 'swerve of the world’ is critically important in rebuilding from COVID-19. We can no longer afford the unreflective malaise of capitalist extractivism and consumerism, and we cannot allow the neoliberal lie of endless economic growth to continue to have such devasting ecological impacts and not be vociferously questioned in mainstream public discourse.
Students today will one day occupy positions of influence, from education to business, from communications to planning, and from political leadership to public policy. Informed knowledges and expertise from Engineering, the Sciences, the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences will be vital.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From Radio 1's Sunday with Miriam Kildare native Dr. Susan Hopkins, Deputy Director of Public Health England, on her role in the UK, Ireland's Covid-19 situation and encouraging young females to study, and work in, STEM.
Empathy
COVID-19 has changed fundamentally how we see the world. Despite our persistent Western-centric worldviews, we now have a heightened awareness of an interconnected global sense of precarity.
The feminist social theorist, Judith Butler, wrote incisively about precarity nearly twenty years ago in Precarious Life. For Butler, seeing precarity, and becoming ethically responsive to it, depends principally upon two things: how we are allowed or choose to see the world, and how we manage to cultivate a sense of empathy.
The first challenge above involves one of the great joys of teaching: piquing student interest. In believing in the power of education to transform individuals and society, front and centre in my belief are my students and their ability to make the world a better place by being more informed and committed to critical thinking and community engagement.
My own discipline, Geography, is about contextualised and historicised knowledge of the complex world in which we live, and I have always enjoyed the journey there with my students.
The second challenge above is a much wider educational brief. It involves a range of overlapping actors in society and mirrors collective senses of social responsibility, citizenship and belonging. It is about seeing the world in a less bounded sensibility of ‘us’ and ‘them’, and being mindful of how it is differentially experienced across class, race, gender, sexuality, disability and other social hierarchies.
My students respond viscerally to the most urgent social justice and environmental justice concerns of our contemporary world, and not just those taking place somewhere ‘over there’, but also at ‘home’.
Their ability to draw upon postcolonial perspectives to critique how modern geopolitical interventionary violence continues to be discursively rationalised through long-established imperial registers of 'Self' and ‘Other’ has everything to do with empathy.
Their capacity to see how an ascendant neoliberalism in Ireland has increased inequalities and marginalised further the poorest in society has everything to do with empathy.
Their sense of how their own citizenship, in a ‘Republic for all’, has been betrayed by the 27th Amendment has everything to do with empathy. And their support for each other in Zoom teaching calls, where not everyone has the confidence to speak, has everything to do with empathy too.
We need your consent to load this rte-player contentWe use rte-player to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review their details and accept them to load the content.Manage Preferences
From Radio 1's Today with Sean O'Rourke, the importance of empathy with Professor Pat Dolan, Child and Family Research Clinic, NUI Galway, Cillian Murphy, Actor
Passionate critique
I recently had a brilliant and politically perceptive presentation from students on the effects of deregulation in the powerful agribusiness sector on habitat loss and ecological fragmentation globally. The presentation was about joining the dots of curiosity on the underlying reasons why our current global pandemic emerged. It was delivered with inspiring passion, and it was teeming with solidarity and hope.
Expert knowledges on key global issues of environmental sustainability and human security needs to be much more impactful and passionately communicated. Students from the Sciences to the Arts are increasingly being equipped with critical and applied knowledges to shape a better world, and not just to be technocrats in serving an impoverished understanding of a successful economy.
Without holistically conceived socio-environmental policy, which is locally-attuned and reflective of conjoined concerns of human and environmental security, much more drastic actions will be required in the future. Negating that feared endgame is undoubtedly a core student concern today, and that is hugely heartening.
The American educational reformer and philosopher, John Dewey, once noted how education is "the fundamental method of social change". It is not just "a preparation for future living", but rather an ongoing self-critical reflection on the "process of living" in the here and now.
Higher education is about bringing students to an informed, critical and productive social consciousness. It is about enabling them to be affected by urgent local, regional, national and global challenges.
It is about advancing critical thinking for its own sake, from multiple perspectives and from the broadest range of disciplines, and about inspiring students to contribute positively to our present and future by thinking and acting in empathetic and potentially transformative ways.
Students today are not perfect, of course, and the challenge of teaching, learning and engagement continues. But they have the ability to passionately critique the world. In the throes of COVID-19, that they can do so from virtual portals in their family homes and student accommodations, denied the intellectual and social currents of everyday university life, is inspiring.
In so many ways in higher education, they are at the centre of a collective project of hope for the future.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
