The German research group recently started a research collaboration with the ‘CoBiS’ (COVID-19-Corpus of the Educational System) project at Europa-Universität Flensburg. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic the ‘CoBiS’ research team around Dr. Martin Bittner and Georg Rißler started collecting official documents published by the ministries of education in all sixteen German federal states. These documents were sent alongside letters to schools (headmasters and teachers), students and parents to communicate how to deal with and react to the crisis and all its implications (i.e. distance-learning, health, education technologies, organizational matters etc.).
We were granted access to the corpus to conduct an analysis on how the complex interrelations of digital education and in/equalities are imagined and manifested as well as on what is problematized within those documents. So far we identified three ‘Critical Discourse Moments’ (Chilton 1988) – moments of massive public controversy and chaos – into which we zoom in for our analysis. With this research we hope to contribute to a critical reflection of the unprecedented global health crisis which also became – for some more than for others – a massive education and social crisis.
Photo by Maksym Kaharlytskyi on Unsplash