“We're not going back to what was before, and we don’t know what the future will look like either”: Exploring the Voices and Images of Educational Administrators in Crisis

Abstract

This paper considers the impact the global pandemic that began in early 2020 has had on educators with an aim to use these experiences to better understand how to navigate educational crises. We use a framework of science-fiction to re-center the what could be within education. Using a mélange of arts-based educational research and post-intentional phenomenology, this paper argues that while we are unsure of what the future brings, we can situate the pathway forward through a more nuanced understanding of the today. While not all science-fiction engages in the critical hope for a more just and equitable future, we use the frame of the what could be as a starting point for this project. Through this work, we discovered how educators navigated this crisis in education with an eye to document what was happening and to understand how these experiences can be retrofitted to tackle other crises within education.