Keywords

1 Introduction

Faced with the current spectrum of global crises, Anna Stetsenko invites the cultural-historical society to a broadened perspective (Stetsenko, 2021). She states that it is impossible to describe the crisis that we now face in great detail as it is multifaceted and poly-dimensional. Addressing this socio-political crisis, however, is a key to understanding the deep mechanisms of any science or research direction.

… science is always and inherently (through and through, in all its elements and dimensions, socio-politically saturated, historically situated, culturally specific, and, therefore, also and inevitably, ethically responsive and responsible. (Stetsenko, 2021, p. 4)

This reminder sets the scene for this section, which focuses on crisis from the viewpoint of the early childhood education professions and their collaborators, including children, families, staff, students, and researchers. We ground our theoretical efforts in cultural-historical perspectives through the construction of a conceptual model in which resilience is a dynamic force found in individuals and nurtured in cultures that can support a responsive, responsible procedure for crisis navigation. Following a cultural historical approach, we are considering both societal, institutional and personal aspect (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2008).

This section will study the nexus of crisis, resilience, and digital agility. The concepts of resilience and agility are both social and personal. According to Dafermos, Vygotsky explicitly stated that the underestimation of the problem of personality was one of the basic shortcomings of his own research program. This problem of personality is a complex issue that Vygotsky proposed to include in his own research agenda (Dafermos, 2018). This section will increase our theoretical understanding of the ways in which the personal (motivation, traits, e.g. engagement, and capabilities in individuals), institutional, and societal are intertwined.

Vygotsky uses of the concept of crisis when referring to the specific mechanisms in human psychological development. Moreover, we expand the concept of crisis using a wider contextual perspective, defining it as a critical moment that needs to be ethically responsive and responsible, as pointed to by Mikhail Bakhin. In doing this, we lean on Manolis Dafermos’s (2022) outlines of the concept of crisis as a dynamic, contradictory, developmental process. This concept enables us to contribute to further actualizing the concept for our time by reviewing cultural-historical research (Dafermos, 2022).

Part V offers examples of how researchers and teacher educators responded to the sudden disruption of collaboration and communication that occurred when the Covid-19 crisis put early childhood educational institutions in an unpredictable situation. We attempt to bridge this gap with regard to the formation of the characteristic of resilience. We postulate that teachers who are particularly resilient in the face of crisis, may have greater digital agility.

The examples are written in the context of the Norwegian Covid-19 crisis, involving collaborators from China and the USA. Norway is a privileged global northern context; in such a context, participants easily take the welfare state for granted, which ensures that every citizen has access to public healthcare.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, trust to authorities and institutions was identified as a key factor for dealing with crises such as the pandemic control. Norway and Finland were internationally identified as two best-practice examples. A high- trust society that utilises caring economics as a deep anchoring of trust and integrity was seen in both countries. It is also worth noting that ‘Dugnad/dugnadsånd’, which refers to the collective effort for common good, is a trust-based Norwegian mentality that has been used to explain mechanisms of pandemic control (Hedenigg, 2021). In this context and given the availability of digital technology, participants could reach out to local regional collaborators as well as collaborators in China and the USA with access to digital communication platforms.

A mentality of ‘dugnad’ could be related to resilience. How a profession, such as the early childhood education sector, reacts to a crisis can be chocked up to either individuals or the collective, societal preparedness for crises. A study of societal preparedness for emergencies and crises showed a strong correlation between high levels of trust in authorities and resilience and preparedness for crises; Norway is of two countries with the highest scores of resilience and preparedness for crisis (Hedenigg, 2021).

Even when overall societal examinations indicate high levels of resilience, a crisis will always be demanding. The early childhood education sector is a first line service and provides crucial services for the public in times of crises; studies have shown that the pandemic was demanding on the staff in the early years sector and both exacerbated old problems and inspired new energy for creativity and problem solving.

In this section, we aim to explore, from a theoretical point of view and through the construction of a conceptual model, how crisis interacts with resilience and agility to help revitalize and ground a model-building effort such that digital agility is seen as a cultural-historical activity that allows professionals to transform and expand their methods of collaboration with academic and professional partners, early childhood teacher education students, and children. Therefore, we defined ‘digital agility’ as a characteristic of the interdisciplinary professional teams involved in the research in this section. Our theoretical contribution will be found through a metanalysis of the chapters in this section.

2 A Starting Point for the Conceptualisation of the Nexus of Crisis, Resilience, and Agility

The concept of a crisis is not often conceptualized, as seen in recent studies of the effects of the pandemic on early childhood research, (Bussey et al., 2022; Pramling Samuelsson et al., 2020; Weiland & Morris, 2022). Vygotsky provides an explanatory cause of the crisis in psychology. He claims that crisis does not occur when there is a disagreement between new facts and the ruling structure of knowledge, as seen in, for example, Thomas Kuhn’s famous explanations of crisis in science. While Kuhn explained that a scientific crisis occurs when the dominant “paradigm” fails to explain new facts and irregularities have been going on for a period of time (Wray, 2021), Vygotsky argued that a crisis occurs when the development of applied investigations connects with new types of social practice (Zavershneva, 2012). Demands and expectations can be of ‘a stormy, impetuous, and sometimes catastrophic character that resembles a revolutionary course of events (Rieber & Hall, 1998). Nevertheless crisis, being oof dialectic character, can take a route from ‘the storm’ to a formative course of creativity, which is of central character when understanding crisis and historical times following a crisis and times to come.

Manolis Dafermos provides a historization of the concept of a crisis and suggests that it is a key concept for both modernity and post-modernity, as the concept challenges understanding of history. Experiencing crises undermines the model of time and the modern idea of history as a gradual, linear, and cumulative progress. Also, the understanding of history coming from an ancient or cyclic understanding are challenged. The word crisis has various meanings, including: (1) a ‘chain of events leading to a climaxing, decisive point at which action is required’, (2) ‘…a unique and final point, after which the quality of history will be changed forever’ and (3) ‘a critical situation which may constantly recur or else to situations in which decisions have momentous (Dafermos, 2022). Dafermos summarises that a crisis, from a dialectical perspective, is a critical moment of a dynamic, contradictory, developmental process, and that this is particularly of interest when regenerating cultural historical theory.

Also, the role of leadership during crisis can be noteworthy in terms of understanding how teachers can show and build collective resilience, as seen in other chapters in this section. However, leadership can also fail when the culture does not back them up during a crisis (Joseph et al., 2022).

Problems can be either easy fixes or long-time, life-threatening issues. Problems, whether in our private or professional lives, are normal; even if you break your leg, it is no immediate crisis, as long as you live in a country that is in a time of peace and has a welfare system. You will then get help and support from the hospital and, in recovery, when entering public life on a pair of crutches, people will offer you their seat on the bus and open doors for you in the workplace. This mentality is known as caring economics (Hedenigg, 2019), which involves the embedding of socio-economic and ecological solutions into the concept; partnership and collaboration are crucial (Eisler, 2007).

The far more serious problems are the ones that societies take decades to overcome, like poverty, climate change, and war. These problems are continuous crises, which either have no clear solutions or are difficult to solve because of contradictory interests and confusing information, or where involve many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values such that the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly difficult (Earle & Leyva-de la Hiz, 2021; Ødegaard, 2023).

Both continuous problems and sudden crises will provide professionals with extraordinary challenges; emotions will be triggered when sudden disruptions and constraints to private lives and professional tasks are experienced. The ways in which people respond to crises depends on personality in addition to the societal and institutional conditions mentioned above.

To understand crises, as critical moments, often contradictory processes, are challenging the view of development as linear and universal steps. Here, a crisis is understood as a series of dynamics with an uncertain outcome. Finding oneself in a crisis with no obvious happy ending triggers novel thinking and new practices. As a response to the need for rapid changes when living in the midst of a crisis, the introduction to Part V will theorise what these chapters describe, namely a digitally agile professional practice as a response to the sudden constraints caused by crises like the Covid-19 pandemic.

For our purpose, it is of interest to examine recent research on the resilience of children’s and their teachers’ lives in times of crisis. Resilience is considered the safeguarding of positive adjustment under challenging conditions. Our approach for understanding the mechanisms in professional lives is the cultural-historical approach, which has been embraced by both the Vygotskyan dialectical and the Bakhtian polyvocal to understand and describe digital agility during the pandemic. Also, the cultural historical activity theory (CHAT) approach is utilised to theorize a design for the use of VR, where adult students motivation’ is at stake. These cultural-historical theories share a common ontological base; cultural-historical concepts are foundational to the key themes of professional pedagogy. Dialectic is central to the works of Hegel and key to understanding how transformation occurs in processes of contradiction and the complexities of both material and relational conditions (Fleer & Veresov, 2018; Ødegaard & Borgen, 2020). The way that development will occur is defined by a range of historical activities, units, and relations; Vygotsky claims that development is an ongoing process, “which feeds upon itself,” (Vygotsky et al., 1993). The role of the structural, social, and material environment is central to cultural-historical theory. However, in our context of a pandemic crisis, adding biological conditions into the complex matrix is necessary to fully understand the problems, development, transformations, and solutions brought up in this section.

It is important to understand how groups of early childhood professionals develop what we can call Collective Resilience, the social bonds that connect people and facilitate recovery and coping (Glynn, 2021). There are several aspects of collective resilience. In a crisis situation, the professional staff must realise their vulnerability and be open to new ways of working. Early childhood professionals have a long-standing tradition of collaboration, and there must be a preference for collaboration in order to achieve collective resilience. The ability to use different competences and to improvise is also important. All of these factors open the floor to collaborative exploration as an important trait for early childhood professionals (Ødegaard, 2021). There is also the trait of agility, defined here as the ability and power to act fearlessly and fast in cases of disruption. Ealy childhood educators must trust that failure is not a catastrophe.

Digital agility is the ability to move easily and quickly by leveraging digital technology and solutions. As researchers, this has evolved as access to literature through search engines and the internet has become easier. The professionals are not to the same extent been using digital platform across institutions. The use of the internet and of digital media in general is most often connected to digital competence, not digital agility, and reflects a person’s ability to be outward-looking and adaptable to a changing world (Kucirkova & Quinlan, 2017).

The concept of agility and the dynamics of agile coping derives from positive psychology. However, other theoretical lenses have been added to better explain the multilevel contextual nature of agile coping in the digital workplace (Ferreira et al., 2021). Agility as a concept connects to other factors that are essential to wellbeing. Positive emotions, like engagement, meaning-making, relationships, and accomplishment, will ground the ability to move quickly to find new solutions. Agility also connects to the influence of cultural-historical approaches and studies of everyday life in institutional worlds.

Change and transformation are familiar concepts in cultural historical theory; in this introduction, we elaborate on the concept of digitalization in the context of the ECE professions, viewing it as a process involving transformation on several levels, including personal, institutional, and cultural (Hedegaard & Fleer, 2008). An explorative mindset, which will be a driver for a resilient digital agility, is theorised within a cultural historical paradigm. An educational culture encouraging resilience and digital agility will be better able to deal with uncertainty and embrace different kinds of knowledges (Ødegaard, 2020, p. 96).

3 Resilient Digital Agility at Work—Four Examples

In Chap. 21, Resilience in partnership research—using digital platforms in the co-creation of knowledge in pandemic times, written by Johanna Birkeland, Elin Eriksen Ødegaard, & Marion Oen, the concept of collective resilience drives the analysis. They introduce the notion that, from a cultural-historical perspective, resilience can be understood as a higher psychological function resulting from collaborative and collective processes (Wertsch, 1993, 2002).

The problem in their study was that the two partner institutions had different digital platforms, regulations and working cultures. They needed to find a common digital tool across institutions in order to communicate effectively and find new meaning in the crisis. The authors describe how the partners responded quickly and manged to work across institutional borders in attempts to recreate tasks.

The response was to use a common digital platform to write in order to share and inspire each other. Resilience is considered the safeguarding of positive adjustment under challenging conditions and was identified as a strong motivation to write success stories about how they changed their practices. Meaning making is central to resilience, as it determines how we find positive meaning in the midst of a crisis. They use the concept of collective resilience (Glynn, 2021) to describe and analyse how resilience occurred between institutions, strengthened an interdisciplinary project to a community mentality, and reinforced individuals such that writing about problems, crisis and the turn towards success, developed in the process.

Chapter 22 of PLUM—SKUM—The making of a video of washing hands with the youngest children after the outbreak of Covid-19, written by Elin Eriksen Ødegaard and Håkon Hoffart, describes a collaborative and interdisciplinary process across countries and generations. Informing children of the importance of washing one’s hands became common during the early days of the pandemic, yet the information was almost exclusively delivered either in a manner best suited to ages four and up, at a time in their development when children were incapable of understanding and obeying complicated oral messages. The authors identified a lack of developmental knowledge and awareness regarding successful communication with children. Although older children might follow the commands of adults regarding infection control, younger children lack the logical tools to process such information. Ultimately, the authors were critical of the information and tool kits provided to kindergarten students for several reasons; on this basis, they created a 90 s video targeting the youngest children with, more imaginative language.

This chapter narrates the process of creating a video targeting the youngest children using cultural-historical and aesthetic analytic models and concepts, where play and imagination are crucial concepts. The design was participatory, as the process involved ongoing dialogue between the researcher, the artist, a family with children 2- and 4-year-olds, kindergarten teachers, and children in three groups (aged 1–3-year-olds). The result was a colourful, abstract cartoon language with stimulating rhythms. This chapter demonstrates how information regarding infection control was recrafted on the principles of attraction and play imagination. The crafting of the video was a response to the national health and education authorities’ efforts to effectively communicate information regarding infection control when reopening kindergartens and schools after the lockdown.

In Chap. 23, VR technology in an engaging kindergarten teacher education, written by Niels Christian Tveiterås and Thomas Bjørner, the authors explore the questions of how Virtual Reality (VR) can play a part in students’ learning in the context of the pandemic. They point out that, before one can investigate if and how VR influences learning, students and teachers must be willing and motivated to use it.

In their chapter, they reckon with the problem of motivation by narrowing the focus down to factors that can impact willingness to utilize a new technology like VR. Using the CHAT theory in addition to Vygotsky’s theory of cultural mediation and Leontiev’s collective model, the activities in question involve subjects working toward achieving outcomes through mediated action (Vygotskij & Cole, 1978). Their VR engagement model, alongside Engeström’s CHAT model, shows how digital competence is engrained with engagement, flow, and motivation. Focus the importance of motivation to use new digital equipment can set off a series of processes for teachers to consider; for example, planning for responsive actions when crises occur in order to enable rapid recoveries. ‘Forward anchoring’, as proposed by the CHAT model, will support the didactic planning regarding how to best respond with agility and resilience.

Aihua Hu and Åsta Birkeland implemented an international collaboration project across the borders of China and Norway, involving researchers and practitioners in a neighbourhood project, in Chap. 24. When Covid-19 severely limited international mobility and face-to-face meetings became impossible, the partners met this problem with a rapid recovery. They sustained the project in ways that showed creativity and resilience. To keep the collaboration going as planned, they utilised digital platforms to conduct workshops. They continued to share information and facilitated communication through both more traditional and more established methods. This practice proved to enable a closer relationship between ongoing professional development and research on education for sustainability; this demanded the recrafting of elements of the project. In their chapter, they discuss how this cross-cultural collaboration worked through digitalization. This chapter describes lessons learnt from a series of digital workshops. Of special interest is the explorative approach on how to collectively analyse the digitally collected data. The participants figured out how the data and analysis could inform further improvement of practice. This demanded a reimagination of the context in which the project should unfold.

4 Respond, Recover, Reimagine, and Recraft—Four Characteristics of Resilient Digital Agility

In sum, we found that:

Cases

Crisis as a problem

Digital response as new opportunity

C23 Partnership research

Disruption of communication across different digital platforms

Rapid response and recovery by choosing one common digital platform and starting to explore and share writing in new genres

C24 Washing hands

Lack of age-appropriate communication

Rapid response by reimaging the sensual and exploratory life of 2-year-olds and recraft a video via intergenerational collaboration

C25 Virtual reality

Problem of motivation

Reimaging digital competence through the CHAT model to find motivation engrained with engagement and flow for the use of crafting a foresighted research design that is tailored for crisis recovery

C26 Neighbourhood

Stop in mobility

Rapid response and recovery through the use of digital workshops and collectively analyses of the digitally collected data.

To help strengthen and ground our model-building efforts, we present the following figure based on the short analysis of the four cases.

Model—Resilient Digital Agility

A circular diagram represents four key actions of resilient digital agility. They are labeled respond, reimagine, recraft, and recover.

5 Conclusion

The professional teams referred to in this section navigated crises with digital agility. Supported my the concept of crises from a cultural-historical perspective, the dialectic deriving from a crisis, elicit a range of practices, some of which is creative and innovative. In this section we introduce a key set of strategically agile processes, enabled by digitalisation, created collective and strategic resilience. The main principles derived from the chapter descriptions can be seen in the key verbs respond, recover, reimagine, and recraft. To be able to respond, recover, reimagine, and recraft after a crisis, professionals must first navigate it. They will need to act fast, meet challenges with a new perspective, and focus on collaboration while allowing missteps and further exploration.

We saw in the first four chapters that the pandemic actualized abilities like digital agility. After summing up on the professionals’ experiences and activities, triggered by the pandemic, we could see the importance of the ability to identify, respond, adapt, learn, and recover as conditions change. We also saw the importance of re-imagining and re-crafting, capabilities that can be employed not only in a crisis, but at all times.

Digital agility is an important characteristic that should be recognized by institutions and across partner institutions. Our examples show that maintaining collaboration and professional development requires digital agility on a personal, professional, and institutional level across institutions and across national lines. One should embrace models that integrate larger ecosystems as disruptive changes often alter both relationships and activities. A digitally agile early year professional is responsive and primed to focus on the best interests of the children in their care as well as their families and other staff.