Educational Emergency and the Teaching “Body”

Abstract

Emergency, as an epistemological concept, challenges pedagogical theory and the practice of education since it is situated in an interplay of critical plans, that plays out between security, urgency and the emergence of the new. The pandemic experience catalyses the issue of emergency but, at the same time, risks giving it an unambiguous reading that does not problematize educational action.

A rigorous pedagogical reading suggests the hypothesis that education can become a “space” in which emergency can be reinterpreted as a novelty that erupts with unexpected transformative potential. Undoubtedly, the destabilizing impact of COVID-19 has touched, in many ambiguous ways, the body and corporeity of children and teachers.

The teaching “body”, together with that of students, has been impacted by the dynamic between distance/proximity, safety/insecurity, presence/absence, prompting it to think about the repositioning of the body, the primary condition of experience, which emerges at the heart of the exercise of teachers’ professionalism.