Hundreds of schools are closed. We’re in lock down again.
This time it’s not COVID, it’s climate.
Waiting for (now Ex-)Tropical Cyclone Alfred to cross the Southeast Queensland coast, there was an uncanny calm. Just as in the pandemic, we saw the predicted effects of the disaster on the news, and the continuous commentary and advice on local ABC radio. But while writing this post, we have not yet fully comprehended the impact. We’re not supposed to get cyclones in this area of the world. They’re not unprecedented, but they’re very rare.
It all seemed eerily familiar. Supermarket shelves stripped bare. Not a piece of toilet paper in sight. No bread or milk. Water was all gone. And the kids aren’t at school.
This area of Australia has become used to crises. Maybe the unnatural calmness that has ‘become the vibe’ for over four million people is because we’ve become immune to polycrisis. 2019 saw devastating bushfires that, once put out, were replaced by COVID. We were barely out of lockdown when the second 100-year flood in 10 years hit in 2022. Now a cyclone has turned into a tropical low with the prospect of another flood.
Ain’t nothing like a Queensland summer, to quote son of Brisbane, Evil Eddie.
Schools working overtime
School communities across Australia have experienced droughts, bushfires, floods, the COVID-19 pandemic, widening inequality and student segregation, alongside a deepening teacher shortage. During that time, schools have operated as disaster recovery coordination centres, community shelters and emergency learning environments. While one crisis can have long-lasting effects on the resilience of a school community, cascading disasters are likely to affect communities in new ways.
At the end of 2022, fellow Queenslander Stewart Riddle and I hatched a plan to investigate what it means to school in times of crisis. I had spent my career watching politicians and lobbyists manufacture education crisis after education crisis. We wanted to know how schooling continued to survive after devastation that did not simply exist in the imaginations and spin of a political agenda.
Knowing there were many education researchers and members of the education community expert in schooling in times of crisis we began to collect abstracts for an edited collection.
We defined crises to include natural disasters, climate risk, gun violence, poverty, disease, and schools in war zones. Schools and schooling were broadly defined as the experiences those in an education community—students, teachers, principals, support staff, parents and local organisations— who interact with schools (e.g., structures, halls, grounds, governance and curriculum) and schooling (teaching and learning) in the context of local and global crises.
Schooling in times of crisis
We received so many submissions publisher Routledge asked us to produce an International Handbook of Schooling in Times of Crisis. What began with Stewart Riddle, from the University of Southern Queensland, and me is now expanded to include three new editors: Bridget Hughes from North Queensland and at QUT with me, Joanne Hughes from Queen’s University Belfast and Brian Beabout from the University of New Orleans. It is due to the publishers later this year.
In collecting these stories, I realised how precious stories of schooling in times of crisis are to how we understand education in the current era. What’s the evidence base for ‘catching up’ two weeks after a tsunami? What does it feel like to be sacrificed to the economy as an essential worker? What does it mean to be ‘future focused’ when members of a school community have been killed in a tragedy?
Transcending the worst possible day in a community’s life
As more stories have come in, I have become more hopeful. I’ve begun to wonder about the power of education to transcend the worst possible day in a community’s life. Why are schools one of the first initiatives set up in a refugee camp? Why is education embedded in a peace treaty? What makes the leadership a principal is most proud of happen during the day and aftermath of a disaster? How do people turn up to teach every day in a guerrilla zone? What is it about education that drives someone to put everything on the line and open a school, as Stewart has done this year?
Ultimately, I have begun to wonder what it means to see schooling as care work that includes knowledge brokering. I have spent much of my career watching and analysing debates about choosing the knowledge and how to broker it, as if children and educators are simply automatons that consume policy, not actual human beings with love and loss.
Generosity in so many ways
In reading so many works of great tragedy I am continually amazed at the generosity of everyday humans. Generosity to their communities and the trust they have put in me and the editorial team to share their stories.
I set my children up to remote school while I tried to get some work done, including writing this blog. But really I was only thinking about holding them close, riding out a storm that looked so impossible. Education, while an enormous part of our lives, is only a part – but it’s not separate.
On Monday, when this blog is published, and I (hopefully) am back at work, I will continue to ask myself what does it actually mean to “education research” with humans, in all their inky darkness, crippling anxieties, overreactions, love, care and glorious beauty.
Naomi Barnes is an associate professor in the School of Education, Faculty of Creative Industries, Education and Social Justice, QUT. She is a researcher interested in how political actors perform and respond to crises. With a specific focus on moral panics, she has focused on education politics in Australia, the US and the UK. She is editor-in chief of the forthcoming International Handbook of Schooling in TImes of Crisis and executive member of the QUT Centre for Justice.
The header image is of Oonoonba State School in Townsville during the 2019 flood. Image retrieved from Wikimedia Commons.
