Building the post-pandemic university: countering inequalities with an ethics of care

By now, concerns about how equity and inequality are playing out in the ‘pivot’ to remote teaching and learning are common in the press and most mainstream political and policy discourses. But early on, questions about the risks to equity and the related responses to such risks within institutions of higher education were being raised. Of these, which concerns for the future post-pandemic persist?

As teaching and learning professionals and academics from 15 diverse universities in South Africa, we deliberated through collective reflection what we were experiencing, observing, designing and trying to mitigate in Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL). Collecting our reflections and raising critical concerns, we collated these in May 2020 during the first semester of the academic year in South Africa, as the country entered a sudden State of Disaster with severe lockdown restrictions. Nine themes emerged from our reflective narratives that provide insight, from the diverse and unequal positions we found ourselves in, into the current status of responses to Covid-19 with regard to teaching and learning through an equity lens.