Keywords

1.1 Setting the Scene

Melbourne (in the state of Victoria), Australia had six lockdowns (seven if you count the worldwide shutdown in March 2020) and more than 250+ days under restrictions during the early stage COVID-19 pandemic. Many called us the world’s most locked-down city, and the last two years were like no other in higher education. For the university sector here in Victoria, the impact of remote work was felt in diverse ways, with different effects’ dependent on the roles and responsibilities held (Croucher & Locke, 2020). Many faculty felt the desire of students to connect and collaborate in ways to sustain and enrich them within what is a traditional face-to-face university (Lederman, 2020). Many students lacked social connectedness and learnt through lurking (Mabrito, 2011) in Zoom, hiding their visibility by turning videos off and muting audio, and hanging on until the call was ended.

The extent of the educational turn differed globally across different higher education contexts as faculty and administrators worked hard to develop new practices, new pedagogies, and shift policies to meet the changing demands of pandemic cohorts. It was evident that a shift was occurring, and it was winding its way through digital connections and Zoom boxes as we faced more days at home as the pandemic became more of a disruptor to the academy. While some students and faculty thrived, many just survived as they juggled family and home or loneliness and isolation (Phillips et al., 2021). Students and faculty had to learn how to learn and teach online while at home, some without the literacies and accessibilities needed (see Designing Education for Well-being and Connection in a COVID Impacted World chapter), and many while they juggled multiple demands. Some graduate students in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education for two years had little social contact outside of Zoom classes and learning management systems (LMS) discussion forums. Faculty were impacted by stress, exhaustion, and burnout (Phillips & Cain, 2020) as their professional lives and teaching and learning practices shifted, often intertwining, and entangling with needed care for colleagues, students, and family. The “major concern and challenge for teachers was to ensure that students were actually “learning,” despite the pedagogical shift to the online circumstances” (Phillips et al., 2021, p. 6).

One of the biggest challenges outside of remote home-based work was the impact on staffing across Australian higher education. As the effect of the financial crisis hit, created by continued reductions in Federal Government education financial packages, closed international and state borders, and few international students in the country (see Chap. 10), we began reeling from rolling redundancies and early retirements (Thatcher et al., 2020). The impact is still reverberating across Australia with the National Tertiary Education Union proposing that more than 35,000 jobs were lost during the initial stages of the pandemic in 2020–21 (MacGregor, 2021). The need to imagine, re-imagine, rethink, and speculate on different futures about higher education as Bass (2020) posited “as if our human future depended on it” (p. 28) was being activated daily.

To create the conditions for knowing, doing, and being differently, while working remotely at home, this book is just one by-product created within a two-year speculative scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) project at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. Our project sought to capture the paradigmatic shift the editors refer to as, the educational turn. The project was designed and developed to create space to reimagine the futures of education, strengthened by collaborative dialogues, innovation, and agility to conceive innovative approaches to inform policy and practice in the “new COVID-normal” world of education. This emerged out of the team’s desire to create opportunities for faculty to co-design their speculative futures for the academy while supporting their professional, personal, and organizational growth and transformation during a health and economic crisis. It also emerged from a need for academics to connect with each other, while they adapted to the new realities of working remotely from home.

While remote home-based work continued, several wicked questions in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education emerged:

  • What might we reimagine if given the chance?

  • Could we be of service more broadly beyond our Zoom classes to create space for discourse about humanity, equity, and change in education?

  • Could we disrupt the present state of higher education by sharing the stories, actions, and research of students, faculty, and administrators in higher education?

  • How could a turn to the scholarship of teaching and learning support this work?

The “turn” refers to the gradual transformation and reimagining of the scientific domains of knowledge in education. The educational turn created space for discomfort, but also for important conversations that revealed serious asymmetries of power and privilege that have permeated all aspects of higher education. The social sciences’ turn to practice assumes that “the meaning of a concept is to be understood through its use” (Collins, 2001, p. 107) and can be understood as an epistemic rupture. The educational turn and its affect felt during the remote emergency pivot online have allowed for a shift in the SoTL imaginary. The turn shone light on knowledge in the academy and was a catalyst for looking inward, outward, and backward while speculating on new futures collaboratively as SoTL.

In 2020, Bass posited some of the challenges facing higher education teaching and learning globally. He stated that:

We must deepen our knowledge, integrate our perspectives, and apply and reflect on our findings in ways that do not just deepen our tools, methods and principles of good practice but also restlessly and authentically open up the questions of learning and higher education as if our human future depended on it. However daunting and intractable the problem of education was before this century; it is far more wicked now. We should respond accordingly. (p. 28)

The problems that Bass posed for higher education were complex and difficult. The editors were also aware that many of the problems in Australian higher education before the pandemic had largely been ill-defined and under theorized (Krause, 2012). Through our speculative think tank seminars and discussions with colleagues we sought to define the problems that we were facing in our context. For us the educational turn allowed opportunities to reconceive, rethink, and reimagine a relational higher education in order to address some of the wicked problems that we needed to respond to.

1.2 The Educational Turn

The educational turn in the title of the book refers to placing SoTL at the heart of our research to reimagine the emerging wicked problems found within educational practices in a pandemic. As described by Prosser and Waller (The Rapidly Changing Teaching and Research Landscape: The Future of SoTL and the Teaching-Research Nexus), “SoTL is a research-informed, evidence-based, critical yet collegial reflection on teaching and learning practice with the aim of improving practice within the aligned disciplines and professions.” The editors imagine the educational turn as a new educational paradigm through different modes of educational forms and structures, alternative pedagogies, and methodologies and programs that developed as shifts in teaching, learning, and assessment practices.

This shift in thinking caused by the catalyst for change that was coming (foreseen as needed) has not only seen practice and power shift but epistemic challenges play out (that acknowledge the experience of all students and staff, not just a few who have access). These include the financial challenges due to decreasing international students in Australian universities (Refocussing the Narrative on the International Higher Education Policy), increasing competition from alternative tertiary providers, the role of digital sites and educational technologies in education (Traversing Learning and Leading Collaborations: Stepping Toward New Power Values During Turbulent and In-between Times chapter), issues of academic integrity, and the changing nature of academic work (The Teaching Profession: Where to From Here? chapter). Our educational turn places SoTL at the center of informing theory and practice in changing and evolving contexts, and speculating how a (re)turn to SoTL can be a site of activism and agent of change. In higher education, the educational turn is not a new concept. Many theorists (Kaiser, 2012; Luke, 1995; Mason, 2005; Plotkin Amrami, 2021) have troubled educational paradigm shifts and turns over the last twenty or so years. Exploring the effects of the shifting knowledge economy (Marginson, 2010), increasing demands on innovations, educational technologies, industry partnerships, graduate employability, and government intervention to produce more human capital (Valero & Van Reenen, 2019). As Larrosa (2010) noted a decade before the pandemic, “[w]hat we have is an attempt to make the logics of the internal performance of the university strictly function in accord with the economic logics of capital and the governmental logics of the state” (p. 693).

Through a co-designed, speculative SoTL project, we (re)turned to SoTL as an emergent next practice for researchers in the academy seeking to make an impact across higher education. We sought to make new contributions to knowledge about teaching and learning that moved beyond single classrooms and broadened to explore SoTL futures. We were able to do this because SoTL is relational; it reaches and weaves across and through disciplines, methods, and perspectives rather than being siloed in one discipline or methodology. This project achieved this through the design of opportunities to trouble and consider speculating on education futures, not as narratives but as thought experiments; provoking, and constructing conversations and inquiry (Huber & Morreale, 2002) on ideas. All while crafting new concepts that were expressed in new collaborations to trouble wicked problems. In this volume, we have scholars of teaching and learning who:

…are prepared to confront the ethical as well as the intellectual and pedagogical challenges of their work. They are not prepared to be drive-by educators. They insist on stopping at the scene to see what more they can do. (Shulman, 2002, p. viii)

In discussing the educational turn, the focus became SoTL in action through the frames of educational practice, pedagogy, policy, and possibilities. What we encountered during the pandemic is a change of direction within SoTL, and this has important consequences for higher education research. We developed new ways of working together as collaborative educators as we collectively considered the ecologies of higher education within the turn. As one of the book’s reviewers noted, “typically a turn is cultural or linguistic and indicates a shift overtime”. Drawing on research, research communities, collaborations, and partnerships at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education we collectively imagine the impact on higher education and implications for educational practices, pedagogies, policies, and possibilities found within the pandemic as a relational turn.

1.3 Wicked Times

Our knowledge of what was and is still to come in higher education is unknown in this pandemic. It is incomplete and often contradictory as the changing needs of quality teaching and learning, facilitation and mentoring of synchronous and asynchronous learning, as well as teaching at home, in hybrid mode continues to change. The large economic burden of the pandemic has impacted differently within the education ecology as the effects of the budgetary impact of border closures, ruptures to research funding and closure of research sites continues to be felt. The interconnected nature of these wicked problems with other problems that had long since been avoided or neglected has been reified in and across higher education. For these reasons, this project did not seek to “solve” the emerging wicked problems, rather, to intervene in the problems by taking an iterative, creative response that utilized a speculative SoTL inquiry process. This was done to consider the steps needed to address the educational turn and consider what next as a professional learning community of practice.

Working within a SoTL inquiry the editorial team created the conditions for faculty to learn with and from each other, in each of their various locations, as they speculated on futures in education through the sharing of stories and scholarship. This iterative process provided a space for reflecting on teaching and leadership practices, pedagogies, policies, and possibilities. Speculative inquiry addresses challenges and opportunities through the co-design of products, services, and scenarios of and for known and yet to be known futures. In a changing environment where it became clear that there would be no return to “normal” post-pandemic practices, the educational turn involved reimagining how we might do better.

The scholars of teaching and learning in this book are working at the edges of innovations in languages and literacies, leadership, assessment, social and cultural transformation, and pedagogies to rethink the educational turn in new sites. As a collaborative, we speculate on educational futures through practice and theory as method within the field of education, within the context of higher education. This context is important and necessary to locate. The editors and authors lived experience is found within what they taught, how they were teaching and researching, and what new methodologies and theories emerged because of new partnerships, relationships, and collaborations co-designed within the SoTL in action faculty-wide project. This volume is a snapshot of a moment in time-providing feedback loops through SoTL that fed the professional learning community and provide something to consider as other educational communities explore this wicked time. To do this the editors have framed, captured, and curated the experience of scholars and educators teaching and researching during the pandemic to provide a framework for faculty to make connections between their own experiences and ours, and to develop their own transformation as they rethink higher education in the post-pandemic recovery.

As a collective, these chapters demonstrate that new ways of knowing can be created through inspirational, infectious, reflective practice as we make room for collaboration. The chapters surface next practices and critical discourse that has developed through new collaborations found within the precarity of the lockdown, emerging wicked problems, and educational turn. As Tsing (2015) proposed,

precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. (p. 20)

To support, capture and further the lived experience of these encounters this volume theorizes the educational turn through emergent next practices, pedagogies, policies, and possibilities.