From the Principal
Covid19 - through a conceptual lens
As we log onto yet another Zoom session, the biblical phrase ‘… now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face…’ seems apt. While the prospect of being face to face is still a long way off, and not wanting to indulge in what I now understand is called ‘toxic positivity’, it is clear that this strange period of dislocation and distance has offered up unique opportunities for learning and growth.
The IB requires students to explore subjects as examples and expressions of universal concepts, ensuring that their knowledge transcends the isolated collections of facts or unrelated information, and allows them to transfer this knowledge across subject areas, to predict and to create new perspectives and understandings.
Adopting each of the 16 central concepts that underpin the Middle Years Programme is a way to think about the current pandemic and offers up some useful reflections for us as individuals, as members of the Preshil community and as citizens.
The MYP concepts are: Aesthetics, Change, Communication, Communities, Connections, Creativity, Culture, Development, Form, Global Interactions, Identity, Logic, Perspective, Relationships, Time Place and Space and finally, Systems. Here is a consideration of some.
Aesthetics – How quickly we seize the opportunities afforded by compulsory masks for decoration, colour and design.
Change – The speed with which we adapt and the slightly alarming eagerness to start identifying any semblance of patterns as ‘the new normal’, suggesting the discomfort we feel with uncertainty and transitional states.
Communication – We have suddenly found ourselves reliant on electronic or social media, with its lack of subtlety, suffering the loss of spontaneity and physical interactions. We have needed to develop whole new sets of signals and languages to enable us to read gesture and individual meaning in a sea of uniformity, as we interact with screens, wrangle emails and search for sub-text in tweets.
Communities – The pandemic has revealed deep inequities, as lip service, spin and surface gloss is stripped away to expose the vulnerable, the sham and the inequalities we prefer to have hidden.
Connections – The essential interconnectedness of every aspect of our experience and knowledge; we already knew no one field of knowledge, no one nation has the answer to any major human problem but realising that divisions, conflict and competition still reign and prevent cooperation, collaboration and finding solutions is cause for despair. Dealing with an event such as a coronavirus pandemic requires a scientific response, but equally calls for social planning, cultural understanding, economics, medical expertise and significant leadership across all of these areas. Our failure to make these connections is a challenge that has eluded human societies across history.
Global Interactions – With the capacity to interact instantaneously around the globe, traditional allegiances, bitter divisions and rivalries are at odds with the contemporary reality. The vestiges of past limitations are embedded in mindsets, symbols and structures that have diminishing relevance in a world where a virus can spread without regard to borders, beliefs or military might.
Systems – We set up systems for efficiency and safety, equity and predictability but too often they become self-serving monsters, impenetrable, unresponsive and utterly impervious to the need for change. Covid19 may well be the crisis that blows apart the systems in education that stifle innovation and keep schools and students locked in outdated traditions and inequitable outcomes.
Let’s apply the endlessly renewable concept of hope.
Marilyn Smith
Principal