Keywords

1 Introduction

The story of a crisis that is told and retold in the chapters of this section builds on a dialectical understanding of a crisis proposed by Dafermos (2014, 2024). By going back to the Marxist and Hegelian roots of Vygotsky’s theory, Dafermos (2024) intends to demonstrate how ‘dialectics can contribute to the regeneration of cultural-historical and activity theory in times of dramatic, multifaceted, global crises and unfinalised transformations’ (p. 2). Such a theoretical reconstruction of a crisis by getting to the theory’s origin seems to be Dafermos’s idea of how to overcome a sort of crisis experienced by the cultural-historical and activity theory itself. Dafermos (2024) aims to ‘regenerate’ the theory and highlight its high responsivity to the complex dynamics of our historical moment. As the deeper understanding of a crisis has been beneficial for cultural-historical theory, it also helps in conceptualising and reflecting on the crises experienced by academic institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic, as described in the following chapters. Before the everyday appearance of crises in academia during the COVID-19 pandemic is reflected on, the dialectic understanding of a crisis is explored in this chapter.

2 Dialectic Perspective on Crises

The core of the dialectical perspective on crises rests on the assumption that reality is constituted by a network of tensions and conflicting powers. From the Marxist perspective, neither tensions nor conflicts are perceived as negative phenomena. On the contrary, they are perceived as perpetual and as the fundamental drive of the historical process (Gramsci, 1971; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985; Marx, 1867), happening through changes in socioeconomic systems, unfreezing hegemonies of meaning and transforming institutional practices and individual perceptions of them. Vygotsky acknowledges the dialectics underpinning sociocultural life and agrees with Engels (1884) that the aim of reflexive work is ‘not to foist the dialectical principles on nature, but to find them in it’ (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 330; Dafermos, 2014, p. 157).

Aware of the complexity of tensions, Vygotsky relates crises in psychology to the impossibility of generalisation: ‘the truly theoretical difficulties of the endeavor of integration of psychological knowledge’ (Dafermos, 2014, p. 159). However, inspired by earlier Marxists and building on the Hegelian logics of history, Vygotsky also hopes for an aufhebung—a sublation that implies a simultaneous negation and maintenance of the conflicting powers and leads to the truth by overcoming tensions while remaining the essence of clashing forces (Hegel, 2018).

We know that science on its path toward the truth inevitably involves delusions, errors and prejudices. Essential for science is not that these exist, but that they, being errors; nevertheless lead to the truth, that they are overcome. (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 337; Dafermos, 2014, p. 159)

Dafermos (2024) criticises the search for truth as contradicting both the highly dynamic biography of Vygotsky and the historical transformations in Russia that he witnessed. However, he points out the high relevance of Vygotsky’s dealing with the perceived crisis in psychology, which was about valuing contradictions and errors and exploring the conditions for their appearance, formation and resolution. The focus on the historical, economic and societal conditions for the appearance of philosophical problems (e.g. the impossibility of generalisation of psychological knowledge) made Vygotsky point out social transformation as the resolution.

Our science could not and cannot develop in the old society. We cannot master the truth about personality and personality itself as long as mankind has not mastered the truth about society and society itself. (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 306; Dafermos, 2014, p. 162)

The foregoing can also be interpreted as pointing to the level of social practice as the plan at which epistemological/philosophical problems are solved, as confirmed by the following quote:

The most complex contradictions of psychological methodology are transferred to the ground of practice and only there can be solved. (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 306)

Summing up the dialectical approach, it is important to underline the constitutive necessity of continuous tension between diverse ideas, between concepts and social practice, between a moment and a historical process, between a fact and the conditions for its appearance and between individuals positioned differently in society who may have different perceptions of the tension(s). A dialectical approach to crisis anchors the phenomenon in the wide network of conflicts and tension but does not identify a crisis with a conflict or tension but with sudden interruptions and cuts of these tensed complexities, after which anything could happen. Dafermos (2024) goes back to the ancient origins of the concept of crisis, where it was associated with ‘the critical phase in the development of a disease, … the point at which a patient is judged to live or die’ (p. 3). Not knowing what will happen, with a wide range of unimaginable possibilities being open, is what characterises a crisis. According to Starn (1971), ‘a crisis pattern could be open-ended, unpredictable, dynamic, rather than static’ (p. 5).

2.1 Dialectics (and Crisis) Explained with the Cultural-Historical Wholeness Approach

The Vygotsky-inspired cultural-historical wholeness approach developed by Hedegaard (2005, 2009), Fleer and Hedegaard (2010), and Hedegaard and Fleer (2008) perceives individuals’ activities as always contextual, situated and inseparable from their sociocultural surroundings. While Vygotsky describes the context in more general terms, Hedegaard (2009, 2012, 2014) offers a systematic model of it (Hedegaard, 2012, p. 130) that in this book is transformed into Cultural-historical Loop Model (Fig. 1.3, Chap. 1), to capture and unpack the dialectics and complexity of a crisis. Nevertheless, it still embraces the perspective of (global and local) society, with its economy, legal apparatus, cultures and traditions that create demands on institutional activity settings and practices. The institutional conditions impose the demands further on different individuals operating within and across diverse institutional contexts. Individuals respond to these demands by developing different motives and activities. These motives can either confirm or challenge the expectations implied in institutional activity settings. The activity settings thus intersect with the institutional demands and individual motives and activities, which make the activity setting the lens through which the dialectics between the human and the context become visible. These are dialectics in which both the human and the context are reconstituted, and neither side determines but co-constitutes the other.

The stories of a crisis and ‘innovating out of it’, included in this section (Chap. 17, 18, and 19), draw their own circles on the multi-modal loops of the Cultural-Historical Loop Model (Fig. 1.3, Chap. 1). All the stories are related to an academic institution and refer to the institutional practices of lecturing and research, which used to be conducted in campus-based activity settings (teaching) and in the network of growing collaborations with the early childhood education and care sector nationally and internationally.

The crisis experienced by the authors of the chapters takes the form of the impossibility of continuation of the institutional practices through the established activity settings. Over a single night, it was decided that neither students nor teachers could access the campus and that PhD students would not be allowed to enter the research fields from which they planned to gather research data. At the same time, universities were demanded by the government to continue their operations digitally and not stop their educational programmes (Norwegian Ministry of Health and Care, 2020). What this demand meant for academia was the transfer of their operations and programmes to a digital space that could be accessed from an individual’s home through a digital entity and an internet connection.

As described by Alicja R. Sadownik, Marie Brandvoll Haukenes, Birgitte Ivarhus Sollesness and Kjerstin Sjursen (Chap. 17), academia became its own hologram and digital representation. The university’s digital infrastructure, which was used only as a representation of the university and its ongoing activities and as a means for correspondence and information provision before the COVID-19-induced lockdown, suddenly became the university itself. This created conditions for the appearance of new digital activity settings and activities, which could be seen as an ad hoc innovation. However, it turned out that was the long-term existence of and activity on the university’s hologram (in compliance with the government’s demand) that turned out to be the actual crisis, resulting in high numbers of students dropping out of the university’s educational programmes. While PhD students could easier transfer their research plans online (Chap. 18) with help of their supervisors, whose many networks already existed digitally, undergraduate students dealt with the crisis from their private homes, dissituated and isolated from important collectives.

The dialectics constituting the educational programmes—the dynamics of shifting between the campus and the home, between the campus and in-service kindergartens, between campus life and informal student life and between classroom lectures and group work—were taken away and reduced to synchronous and asynchronous sessions and breakout rooms on Zoom. The social situation of the students’ professional development became ‘a dissituation of development’ (Sadownik et al., Part IV, Chap. 17). The lecturers eventually gained mastery of the digital tools but at the same time struggled with a feeling of co-creating an irrelevant innovation that reduced the complex multi-level early childhood teacher education to a digital exchange of meanings. The governmental demand for and the teacher educators’ motive of continuing the educational programmes had tensed relations with passive black screens in Zoom rooms and high numbers of students dropping out.

Thus, for the students, the crisis was about the sudden emptiness that they felt, which was impossible to fill with a digital meeting of ‘talking heads’ and ‘black screens’. The social practice of education was cut off, which dramatically reduced the social context of teaching, learning and development. The content of the lectures could not be ‘transferred to the ground of practice’ (Vygotsky, 1997, p. 306), or to the social community of learners, to be solved. However, some undergraduate and PhD students seemed to do well and experienced meaningful progress in their projects and learning.

While some undergraduate students, supported by their families, travelled around Norway and logged in on Zoom lectures from their tents on coasts or mountaintops, PhD students, in close dialogue with their mentors, co-created strategies for overcoming the challenges.

In the Chap. 18 written by Czarecah Oropilla’s we read about the co-creation of a new research design with the participation of the supervisor and private networks, and in the Chap. 19 written by Baizhen Ciren, we read about the implementation of open data policies and data sharing (which were not highly popular in qualitative research before the COVID-19 pandemic). The process of redefining research designs is not free of dilemmas. Oropilla uses the metaphor of pivoting to capture the dialectics of the process: having one foot standing while the other probes the possibilities of moving forward and quickly considers how to move forward towards signals coming from outside.

In basketball, pivots are made by players as they stand in one place, with one foot on the ground and the other being used to change their direction as they ponder on their game plan on where best to bring the basketball. (Oropilla, Chap. 18)

Nevertheless, in contact with the research community, which creatively ‘ponders’ new methods (Lupton, 2021), Oropilla overcomes the stagnation in her project.

Ciren (Chap. 19) captures the pondering of how to move forward with the metaphor of unfolding DNA molecules of twisted motives and goals tightened up with restrictive conditions of no travel, which finally unfolds the idea of data sharing. The old demand of the Berlin Declaration (2003) was never really employed in social qualitative research, unless the crisis entwined with the motive of caring for early-carrier researchers.

Apart from data sharing, a range of other methods unfolded and allowed the research practice to continue through the university’s hologram. The satisfactory outcomes of these innovative, digitally based solutions allowed us to reflect critically on activity settings and institutional practices from before the pandemic. Being locked on the hologram forced us to pivot further digitally and thus allowed to experience how much of the digital potential was never used in the university’s institutional practices. Realising this resulted in diverse hybrid forms of participation in research and the transformation of different educational programmes accessible to students who could not move to an urban setting to study (White Paper No. 5, 2022–2023).

3 Back to Normal?

This dialectics of the physical and digital form for teaching, learning and researching, allowing to develop new hybrid forms, made the ‘back to normal’ that many have been waiting for since the COVID-19 pandemic, impossible. The ‘normal’ that we experienced after the pandemic intertwined the physical and digital activity settings in ways that we could never have thought of if not for the experience of radically different conditions in our societal, institutional and personal lives.