Conference Agenda

In diagnoses of our time, crises - and how they overlap (Polycrises) - have become a central category to describe current and future societal conditions, as well as challenges and opportunities that educational systems worldwide need to (pro-)actively confront. These comprise, amongst others, the climate crisis, the energy crisis, the economic crisis, the diversity crisis (currently also in relation to digital bias), and the COVID-19 crisis. The threats and disruptions of these and other crises already have had and will bring further changes to the future of the individual, society, and the planet, as well as the systems of Education and their contexts. Crises need not only be seen as dystopian (external) events affecting systems but also in relation to their potential to initiate turning points for transformations and changes by social actors operating in different contexts. For example, personal and interactive crises can serve as starting points for learning and Education, especially when teachers accompany them well. We see Education and vulnerability as deeply intertwined. While Education in itself must be seen as a vulnerable social process since individuals need to change their current understanding of themselves, towards the world and one another, also the contexts in which Education takes place are highly volatile and vulnerable to external circumstances: The way in which processes of Education and Bildung are structured through policies and finance mechanisms bracket the experiences that teachers and students can make in these systems and thereby opening and limiting opportunities for dealing with and utilizing crises for their educational potential. In our symposium, we want to investigate the perspectives of students and adults who have been experiencing times of crisis not only in these already vulnerable educational contexts but also from a position of previous marginalization prone to reinforce prior, shift, or create new vulnerabilities. Educational Research conducted since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated existing inequalities in Education, especially for children and adults living under conditions of poverty, disability, and 'divergent' or non-European backgrounds. Yet, Research in which these groups' own perspectives on their perceptions of vulnerability have been the starting ground to investigate deeper contemporary structural issues of in/equality remain scarce. This symposium will shed light on this desideratum. We will take the COVID-19 pandemic as an example to embed and problematize those experiences. Not only do we want to give students the possibility to voice their experiences from their point of view, but we also want to investigate the contexts in which those experiences were generated, e.g., isolation, rules in children's homes, the provision of (educational) support and accommodative measures during school closures and lockdowns as well as their impact on students' possibilities to participate in online or remote ways of communication. In the symposium, we want to take a comparative perspective by investigating the situation in three European countries (Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom) as well as Canada and see how far different approaches in dealing with the pandemic can be seen as reflections of how differing contexts address, thematize, react and adapt to situations of crisis in educational contexts. We want to show how these contexts differ not only in an international comparison but also within countries and societies themselves. Our Research also indicates that, albeit in fragile ways, crises can lead to new forms of individual and collective (political) agency and conscientization toward/equality and its social production amongst groups considered vulnerable. In that regard, Educational Research can serve a catalyzing function, raising various ethical and methodological issues and challenges, some of which will also be shared and discussed within this symposium.

This paper investigates the experiences of children and teenagers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This group is particularly at risk of being affected by negative consequences of the COVID-19 situation because they experienced the pandemic during their transition from childhood to young adolescence, which is a vulnerable phase. In the project "Impediments and enablers to schooling of non/privileged students during the COVID-19 pandemic – a comparison between Canada and Germany", funded by the German government, we compare how students from non/privileged milieus experienced school and out-of-school (including family) life during the different phases of the pandemic, as well as the school and classroom ways of dealing with them. An indicator of levels of inclusion, equity, and diversity provided by students' "sense of belonging" in schools. This indicator reflects how students' individual and group needs are being accommodated in both academics and school life in general. Canada ranked 15th out of 32 for this measure, and Germany 25th (OECD, 2018, p. 193). School contexts differ between these two countries as well: while the German states has a tracked school system that distinguishes vocational and academic tracks, Canada's provinces have only one track. The different school tracks correlate with different socio-economic privileged milieus, while inequality in Canadian schools is related to the school catchment area. The context also differs since schools in Germany were closed for almost a year – with small breaks in between – while Canadian schools only closed for two months at the beginning of the pandemic. In the paper, the experiences of non-privileged students on schooling and out-of-school life in Canada and Germany are contrasted. This will be done based on group interviews conducted with small groups in the schools. The comparison shows that non-privileged students from Germany were experiencing exclusion from educational resources much more than their peers in Canada. Due to the lack of devices and internet access, they were not included in day-to-day options in remote exchange with teachers and peers. Moreover, they were not engaging in other activities, like gardening, at home. In contrast to their Canadian peers, the German students were offered less support, like reducing academic expectations and offering personal support in working on tasks.

OECD. (2018). Equity in Education. Breaking down barriers to social mobility, PISA. OECD, Publishing. https://doi.org/doi:https://doi.org/10.1787/9789264073234-en

This contribution sheds light on potential shifts in the perception of vulnerabilities and their impact on institutionalised education and care from the perspective of those who may have been, remain, or have become (even more) vulnerable. Rather than affixing the label of "vulnerability" to a particular subpopulation or seeing vulnerability (solely) as an inherent characteristic in individuals, we follow Luna (2019), who proposes a contextual understanding of vulnerability. She develops an understanding that the vulnerabilities might be subject to change if situational contexts change, such as that an individual is no longer or even more susceptible to vulnerability. Crises, as in our case, the COVID-19 crisis, can serve as an excellent example of unravelling the multilayeredness and potential cascading effects of vulnerability itself and the diversity among those being perceived as vulnerable. As indicated in this symposium's umbrella text, individual dispositions of becoming vulnerable have to be seen in relation to contextual factors. In crises and their aftermath, well-established, inscribed, or outdated institutional logics that often control or guide vulnerable peoples' lives may be shattered or exacerbated. Support structures, processes, and interrelations may be subject to dysfunction, disruption, or new orders. Shocks to the system during COVID are being addressed and negotiated from an abstract or institutional perspective (Mladenov & Brennan, 2021), seldomly do those who might or have been affected get a say. The research project "Cov_Enable: Reimagining Vulnerabilities in times of crisis" (FWF Project P 34641) has been tracking some of these developments. It aims to shed light on how conceptions of vulnerability are being reshaped and travel between the political-, organisational- and individual levels (Subasi-Singh, 2022). In particular, it wants to disentangle how (new) discourses and practice (formations) in the contexts of (inclusive) education and (supported) living are impacting children, youth, and adults labeled as vulnerable. In this presentation, we will use selected samples of first-hand accounts of students and adults with disabilities from two contrasting lifeworlds and governing institutional systems in the fields of schools and supported living of remaining, recently being made (further), and or no longer being vulnerable. We aim to elucidate an understanding of the multilayered-ness and contextual interdependency of varied institutional changes in response to crises and the diverse forms of individual and collective (political) agency and how these are being enabled or suppressed by institutional actors.

Luna, F. (2019). Identifying and evaluating layers of vulnerability–a way forward. developing world bioethics, 19(2), 86-95. Mladenov, T., & Brennan, C. S. (2021). The global COVID-19 Disability Rights Monitor: Implementation, findings, disability studies response. Disability & society, 36(8), 1356-1361. Subasi-Singh, S. (2022). Putting on Intersectional Glasses: Listening to the Voice of the Vulnerable. Social Inclusion, 11(1).

The Voices project engaged with 1860 children and young people aged five-to-18 years over 21 months in the North East of England during the pandemic about their experiences of COVID-19 across multiple life facets through participatory methods using drawing, writing, focus groups, comics and action cycles. They were from 70+ mostly economically disadvantaged schools and groups in North East England. We heard what it was like doing online schooling at home and attending school with Covid-19 arrangements, and we heard about varied and complex aspects of informal learning and experience. This project was co-produced by researchers and practitioners from Newcastle University (UK) and the charity/NGO Children North East, and with children and young people. We draw on the work of Forbes and Kerr (2022) of asset-based approaches to communities considered vulnerable. They suggest the need for “policymakers to shift attention from ‘fixing’ the perceived deficits of disadvantaged neighbourhoods, to recognising and building on the resources, or assets, they hold” (Forbes and Kerr, 2022, 1). This paper considers this juxtaposition between assets and vulnerabilities from a number of perspectives and we present two of them in some detail. These include, 1) taking a non-stigmatising approach to sampling and 2) co-producing some aspects of the research with children and young people. In terms of sampling, we set out to engage with children who were from economically disadvantaged backgrounds and from a range of vulnerable situations. Our paper discussed how we negotiated building our sample at the same time as refusing from an ethical perspective to ask for individual vulnerability data. Co-production assumes mutual respect for each other’s contribution to design, create and deliver (research, services, actions) and therefore requires the recognition of the assets of all those involved. A range of different methods (focus groups, drawing pictures, writing, producing comics with artists, producing a TikTok video) were built into the project to enable children and young people to respond in different ways. Co-production was built into the project from the start with action cycles co-produced with young people engaging with stakeholders in the areas of transport, employment and digital lives. We consider what arose for children as home school boundaries collided in a number of ways not all of them expected and themes from the research were in every aspect of children’s lives.

Forbes, C., & Kerr, K. (2022). Endogenous assets-mapping: a new approach to conceptualizing assets in order to understand young people’s capabilities and how these relate to their desired educational outcomes in disadvantaged neighbourhoods. Cambridge Journal of Education, 1-17.