‘Returning to normal?’: Bourdieu, systems thinking, and online teaching post-COVID-19

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic and resultant transition to online teaching was a profound shock for universities and their stakeholders (teachers, students, and administrators). Bourdieu’s concept of hysteresis (systemic rupture) describes how such disruptions provide an opportunity to question and potentially reshape elements of our collective social reality. However, his work also explores how our shared sense of what is ‘normal’ tends to be deeply ingrained and resistant to change.

As the pandemic fades into the background of our collective memory, many tertiary teachers may be tempted to view tertiary teaching as a rubber ball which can simply bounce back to ‘the way things were’. But the Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) which underpin our social reality do not behave like rubber balls. The Panarchy (Adaptive Cycle) heuristic offers a useful lens for understanding how the resilience of such systems lies in their ability to adapt when faced with challenges like the pandemic. Such disruptions can ripple through interconnected parts of the system, leading to changes which persist even after the initial crisis has passed. Such systems do not ‘bounce back’ unchanged after such shocks.

The longing to return to pre-pandemic norms in university teaching is both personally understandable and sociologically explicable by reference to Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field. Yet the disruption caused by COVID may be precisely the kind of transformative event that the panarchy model captures well. The changes triggered by the pandemic may endure beyond its official end, reshaping systems in ways we did not anticipate. In this sense, our systems are not always resilient in the way we want them to be.