Keywords

1 Introduction

Researchers who have contributed to this book collectively solved the research problem of practice brought about by a global pandemic. In so doing, new activities and cultural practices became normalised within the academy, adding weight to the idea that culture is more than the formation of social life and of the social activity of humans; also, materialistic and biological conditions are added. This was realised through the changing material and digital context of the lived and morphed hologram of the academy. The book truly embodies Bakhtin’s idea of polyglossia as PhD students and senior researchers from two continents, Europe and Australia, researched, through digital devices, many more countries (e.g. China, India, USA). We have met on the terms of the English language, but a range of mother tongues have been activated when preparing for engagement in regular digital webinars for sharing, response and discussions. Such a wide range and extensive internationalisation through digital exchange have stimulated, embodied and challenged cultural-historical insights and theorisations.

What we have collectively learned through the process of bringing into existence the dialectics of crisis and innovation, is the capacity we have as humans to generate from these new demands the imagining of solutions that we have shown in Chap. 1 in a crystalised form of a model (Fig. 1.2) that explains our theorising (methodology). This concluding chapter is framed around three key dimensions that have emerged from the stories of the authors as they met the new demands of the crisis. They are:

  1. 1.

    Considerations of ethical dimensions/decisions as cultural-historical researchers

  2. 2.

    Meeting future challenges, dramas, and crises with digital agility

  3. 3.

    Our model as a response (shield) to current and future crisis

These are discussed in turn.

Considerations of Ethical Dimensions/Decisions as Cultural-Historical Researchers

From the position of privilege (economic survivors of the Global pandemic) we have had the resources to bring together researchers from across 3 Centres of research and through equal partnership and twinning across institutions. Funded in Australia by the Australian Research Council through the Laureate Fellowship Scheme (FL180100161), the Conceptual PlayLab at Monash university has been resourced to bring international and localised networking. PhD students and researchers came together to study children’s development in the context of a pedagogical model of a Conceptual PlayWorld. This is a planned intervention that was originally developed as taking place within the institutional practices of childcare, preschool, kindergarten, and school, but which we expanded to the families in broad contexts of community gardens, playgroups, and makerspaces. How the educational experiments morphed to meet the demands of the Global pandemic, is reported as new research methods throughout the sections of this book.

Likewise, the researchers from the KINDknow Research Centre for Systemic Research on Diversity and Sustainable Futures, funded by the Norwegian Research Council (RCN-275575) brought together PhD students and senior researchers for twinning locally and across the international milieus. The KINDknow Centre has resourced a series of work projects, which were conceptualised in relation to co-creation with community, NGO’s, kindergartens and teacher education in Norway and internationally. The Pandemic created the conditions for innovation through the leadership of the centre, by the Centre Director as well as by the researchers themselves.

At the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, a research team is currently being built, a play lab focused on STEM in order to create infrastructure to support emergent new practices in research for the Greek context. During the pandemic, researchers experienced a crisis in diverse research contexts allowing a critical reflection on the dialectics of crisis and pointed to the vital role of staying connected to the research community and continuing international collaboration that generates innovation, resilience, and social change.

Meeting Future Challenges, Dramas, and Crises with Digital Agility

In research, we have an ethical position that we hold as individuals, but also as part of being in a collective research group. In this book, the new innovative practices and the ethical position held by the researchers were made conscious through how the authors discussed the resolution of the problems they met. This was operationalised in two key ways.

First, in the process of bringing forward the new research methods introduced in the chapters of this book, researchers made conscious the demands they were experiencing, which in turn developed a new motive orientation towards innovation. This could have been a negative experience or could have created a sense of hopelessness. However, the common theoretical frame of a cultural-historical perspective created a collective orientation for solving problems to meet the need for continuing the research—but in new ways.

Second, in many of the chapters, the authors described how they worked together to meet the new demands and brainstormed possible imagined solutions. These solutions generated a sense of positivity and respected the resourcefulness of the researchers; we recognised resilient digital agility in the researchers. The process of preparing the manuscript gave researchers a way of realising the elegance and theoretical robustness of their solutions, and this became a temporary cathartic moment that further positively impacted the researchers’ well-being. The researchers not only generated new knowledge, but they developed new research methods which this book collectively theorised through the introductory chapter and the section chapters.

Our Model as a Response (Shield) to Current and Future Crisis

Crises such as the Global pandemic, disasters, or violent conflicts and brutal wars present what can be similar to old social situations, as conflicts, disasters, and wars are not new, and historically, this has been challenging for researchers as it presents disruption, hurdles in previous ways of functioning and even danger to lives. What is new to this situation is the digital agility this group of researchers developed during the years of the Pandemic. To continue to work effectively in these circumstances, researchers were challenged and took action to redesign their existing research methods. The present volume especially engages with the use of digital artefacts, but the use of these artefacts demands a theorisation that captures the dialectical and mutual constitution of the individual and digital. One of the central themes we have explored in this book suggests a theoretical, knowledge-laden and collective response to uncertainty where the use of digital methodology is based on the secure foundation of the cultural-historical theorising of practice. The crisis thus was seen as a moment for new knowledge production. The chapters in this volume have liberally drawn on Vygotsky’s theoretical work on crisis and the theorisation of human development. In addition, Mariane Hedegaard’s work on the dialectical-interactive approach guided our methodological innovation with an attempt to respond to new demands of research in times of crisis (e.g. Hedegaard, 2008, 2020) and the work where she adds biological conditions to the cultural-historical in order to more fully understand what effects children’s development and cultural formation (e.g. Hedegaard & Ødegaard, 2020). In striving to respond to the challenges of the practice in early childhood education sector authors extend and offer a gamut of new concepts e.g. resilient digital agility, collective relational proximity, digital methodological agency, digital collaboration in educational experiments, dis-situation of development and pedagogical innovations. These ideas together contribute to the development of the model presented in the introduction chapter, the attempt is to develop a dynamic and dialectical model that encapsulates the infinite capacity of human imagination and creativity. This is not to undermine the in-flux of political-economic situation in times of crisis that creates new social conditions of labour in the workplace and home settings. Conceptualising digital methodology from the cultural-historical perspective offered researchers an agency to engage with the dynamic and constantly changing ‘in-here’ and “out-there” nature of reality. One of the unique high points of using Vygotsky’s work, as Stetsenko (2011) highlights, is “acknowledging the importance of adopting an evolutionary perspective in understanding human development, yet suggests the model that integrates human agency, self-determination and freedom” (p.26). In the times of a Global pandemic a cultural-historical stance to support the theorising of new research methods (methodology) associated with using digital tools helped to transcend the biological constraints and actualise the potential of human beings; new relationship to the world and their new mode of existence – realised through collaborative labour mediated by collectively invented cultural tools (Stetsenko, 2011, p.26).

In conclusion, we can see in many of the chapters that there are a series of dramas and resolutions depicted. The digital experiences and innovations also brought into practice new ways of being and becoming researchers. The tragedy is not just a moment of one drama of the theatre, but rather an ongoing series of dramas, which each brought resolutions which were crystalised as a new digital research method. There were many revolutions of the drama and resolution dialectic because as one solution was determined, a further drama was realised. Just as Vygotsky and many of his followers have argued, the imaginings become crystalised in reality, and these, in turn, impact the way people function with new tools, rules and signs in everyday life (eg. Kozulin, 2003). The new tools, rules and signs that emerged from the practices of the researchers initially came about because of a personalised crisis, and our scientific reading of the crisis allowed for methods to be theorised within a methodological frame, as presented in the first chapter of this book.