Teaching in Times of Crisis: Covid-19 and Classroom Pedagogy

Abstract

Although the syllabus content and reading materials remained unchanged, the class discussions tied our current collective predicament to IR theories and concepts. The final exam, which— under normal conditions—would have consisted of a set of short answers and multiple-choice questions, was changed to a long essay. The exam asked, “What IR theories and concepts can help usmake sense of the global spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications on world politics (broadly defined)?” Students’ responses to this question demonstrated a range of serious and personal engagement with IR theories and the pandemic, as well as the ways in which it disproportionally affected racial and ethnic minorities, low-income families, and otherwise vulnerable populations in the United States. Drawing fromMarxist and postcolonial theories and a critique of capitalism, many students argued that COVID-19 was one of numerous other medical and social “pandemics” that can be traced to the legacies of unequal distribution of power and opportunities in the United States and around the world. A pandemic pedagogy of care therefore opens up the possibility of “doing IR as if people mattered.”4 In this instance, for a student population of young Black men in America, the COVID-19 pandemic along with the police and state violence and Black Lives Mattermovement that flared up this summer are all central to how wemake sense of and relate to the world of (international) politics. Ultimately, if we accept Inayatullah’s (2019, 18) polemic that “Teaching is impossible. Learning is unlikely... [W]e enter the classroom to encounter others.With them, we canmeditate on the possibility of our own learning,” perhaps then a pandemic pedagogy of care is simply that: encountering our students so we may all meditate on our collective predicament.▪