When you walk through practically any school today, the first thing you notice is how much the furniture hasn’t changed. There are still rows of desks. The whiteboards continue to creak.
The laptops are newer, but the architecture of the time—bell, lesson, bell, lesson—hasn’t really changed. There’s also a slightly worn-out smell of disinfectant that wasn’t present before 2020. It appears as though a different building was affected by the pandemic.
| Profile: Cambridge Perspective on Post-Pandemic Pedagogy | Details |
|---|---|
| Institution | University of Cambridge, Faculty of Education |
| Field of Focus | Pedagogy, education in emergencies, digital learning equity |
| Geographic Reach | Partnerships with over 25 governments worldwide |
| Period of Inquiry | Three decades of research into technology in classrooms |
| Defining Concept | Pedagogy — from the Ancient Greek for leading a child |
| Counterpart Concept | Andragogy — the teaching of adults |
| Key Crisis Studied | COVID-19 school closures, 2020–2022 |
| Notable Reference | The 2020 New York Times article on China’s digital divide |
| Recurring Finding | Educational technology tends to widen inequality, not close it |
| Adjacent Research Area | Education in Emergencies (EiE), shaped by displacement studies |
That is the peculiarity of modern education. Even though there was a significant disruption and a loud recovery, the fundamental teaching habits have hardly changed. After thirty years of researching technology in the classroom, Cambridge researchers typically greet that fact with a sort of weary recognition. They anticipated it. Digital tools in education have a tendency to widen rather than close the gap between privileged and disadvantaged students, which is an uncomfortable reality derived from years of work that predates Zoom. In the 1960s, Sesame Street was meant to address that. It didn’t.
The pandemic seems to have simply brought the old patterns to light. Students in rural China had to climb mountains to find a strong enough phone signal so they could go to class. Families in Vietnam constructed modest huts wherever the internet was available. Since not every home in France had a functional printer, volunteers added printed homework to food parcels. These were the system’s flaws, not anecdotes. It became difficult to maintain that “online learning” was a single phenomenon that affected everyone equally as it developed.
It turns out that digitizing teaching is more difficult than previously thought. Assigning homework and sending instructions is more akin to early 20th-century correspondence courses than it is to anything resembling an actual classroom. Real teaching entails observing things like the student who has been silent for three days, the perplexed expression, and the incomplete sentence. When his email lessons weren’t getting through, an American teacher went to a student’s house with a portable whiteboard and used the glass door to explain the math. That picture stays with you. It makes a statement about what education is and is not.
Cambridge’s work draws from Education in Emergencies, a less well-known but increasingly important field that emerged from studies of displacement and conflict. The similarities to lockdown are unsettling. fragmented education. broken curriculum progression. Evaluations are devalued. Uncertainty is causing emotional safety to falter. Researchers who have worked in refugee contexts are familiar with all of this. The fact that it occurred, momentarily, practically everywhere is novel.
Now, there is a temptation to view reopening as a return to normal, complete with tidy uniforms, masks tucked into pockets, and the bell ringing on schedule. That might be precisely the wrong instinct. If anyone seizes the chance, it won’t be to force improved tablets onto an outdated schedule. When the home, the screen, and the street are all components of the learning environment, one might wonder what school is for. It’s still unclear if anyone is interested in that question. After all, the desks are still arranged in rows.
