Across the world, the pandemic has transformed adult education. After over a year, some governments are looking at a falling number of infections, and starting to relax restrictions; elsewhere, the situation is deteriorating. It seems as good time as any to take stock of the pandemic’s impact and the sector’s response, and this Call for Papers is therefore highly timely:
The Coronavirus pandemic has disrupted all aspects of life, including lifelong learning and adult education. It has had a profound impact on the formats, demand, and opportunities for adult education. Most notably, there has been an increase in digital formats and online learning, whereas many forms of in-person instruction were postponed, canceled, or reduced in scope. On the supply side, the pandemic has shaped the conditions under which providers can operate and offer instruction. Regarding participants, demand for adult education has increased in some areas because changes in working and living conditions triggered by the pandemic require new skills and decreased in others due to fear of infection.
As all great disruptions, the pandemic also offers potential for creative innovation and long-term change. Now that the pandemic is in its second year, it is possible to both review the impact the pandemic has had so far as well as take a first outlook at prospective ways in which the past year will transform adult education in the future.
The editors invite submissions that discuss the impact the pandemic has had on adult education, broadly defined. Topics might include but are not limited to changes in instruction and participation, the impact the pandemic has had on educators, learners and institutions, increased digitalization and associated challenges, social inequality and vulnerable groups, and changing demand and supply for specific subfields or subgroups.
The Call is from the leading German journal for adult & further education research, the Zeitschrift für Weiterbildungsforschung. The journal is refereed, publishes open access contributions in English and German, and is issued by the prestigious Deutsches Institut für Erwachsenenbildung. The CfP will soon appear on the journal’s website, but in the meantime you can send queries to Dr. Kerstin Hoenig of the DIE at:
Concepts in the social sciences go in and out of fashion even more quickly than hairstyles. My first encounter with this phenomenon was as an undergraduate, when we were told in our first year to grapple with Althusser only to hear as third years that structuralism was “old hat”. The idea of social capital, which became extremely popular around the millenium, has now been around for over 20 years. Does it still have any continuing relevance today?
I need to start by declaring an interest. I wrote quite a bit about social capital, both on my own and with my colleague Tom Schuller, and ended up publishing a short text book on the concept. It is in its third edition and has now appeared in several languages, and is unique among my publications in generating any serious income from royalties. So I am pleased to announce that the concept appears to be alive and well, if not as popular across the social sciences as it was around the year 2000.
I’m basing this judgement on some very simple metrics from Google Trends. A straightforward search of all items shows that while global use of the term peaked in March 2004 (and therefore represents Google’s index point of 100), its use hovers around one quarter of that peak right through to the present.
Next I looked at use within the USA only. The use of the term has held up rather better among Americans than in the rest of the world, with most periods showing an average use rate of just under half its peak level of February 2004. Interestingly, Americans’ interest peaked again in Aril 2020, a spike that I reckon has to be linked to academic and public debates over social capital and the pandemic.
Far from disappearing, the concept of social capital seems to be thriving. Some people – myself included – continue to found it a fruitful way of highlighting the ways in which our social connections serve as a resource in ways which then have wider implications for our communities and for the organisations to which we belong.
Recently I posted a brief summary of research into social capital’s consequences for our current pandemic. We know much less, at this stage, about the way the pandemic, and particularly social distancing strategies, is reshaping people’s social ties. So here’s my attempt to summarise briefly what we do know; be warned that some of the evidence comes from snapshot survey findings and is therefore more limited than I’d like.
We certainly know that loneliness is seriously bad for one’s health, and I assume that social distancing on your own is a pretty lonely experience – possibly even a frightening one. Equally we know that mixing with family and friends is good for health and well-being, and presumably distancing can damage that. And studies of the SARS pandemic concluded that social isolation combined with extreme uncertainty had created severe psychological stress.
Some researchers, drawing on data from China, have linked isolating with anxiety, sleep disorders, and depression; similar findings are reported for Italy. It isn’t clear, at least to me, how far these patterns are a result of lockdown and the loss of social support systems, or are a consequence of fear of infection. Still, there clearly is a down side, with isolation depriving people of the social anchoring that they depend on.
Then there is the impact of the pandemic on fragile or exploitative social bonds. A number of countries report a rise in home-based violence (usually, but of course not always, male on female or adult on child). Whether we will also see a longer-term rise in family break-ups as a result of confinement combined with anxiety is yet to be seen.
And anecdotally, while most of us appear to be willing to protect the community by distancing, all of us have seen cases of selfishness bordering on crass stupidity, like cyclists and jogger insisting on exercising their overtaking rights in narrow footpaths. Is there also an up side?
One way to look at this is to focus on social media and our ties. While we might moan about Zoom meetings, they allow us to see and engage with workmates, family, and friends in a way that was unimaginable in past times. Yes, of course a virtual hug with grandad isn’t the same as the real thing, but it’s a hug; and many of us are becoming ever more adept at communicating in new ways.
Second, at least in the UK, there has been an upsurge in volunteering. Much of it is informal and unseen, from women sewing face masks to people phoning an elderly neighbour. One survey estimates that a fifth of UK adults have started volunteering in their community since the pandemic broke; two-thirds of all UK adults reported that their community was stronger as a result of the pandemic. Mutual aid groups have sprung up across the country, and are increasingly linked together as a movement.
Third, there have been highly visible symbolic expressions of mutual solidarity. The best example was the weekly public applause for key workers, which in our street was led by an increasingly proficient piper playing Highland Cathedral. Some of my Facebook friends sneered at the people who came out to applaud, but not one of them is a nurse, hospital porter, bin collector, care assistant, soldier, or delivery driver.
Public solidarity with low-paid and largely disregarded workers is a rarity, and not something I can view with contempt. And certainly in our case, lockdown has seen increased interaction with neighbours, whether in the aftermath of the Thursday applause or in the form of book exchanges, distanced coffee mornings, or chatting among wild garlic gatherers.
Like other forms of social capital, symbolic solidarity has consequences: recent survey data show a massive rise in the number of key workers who say they feel appreciated by the public. This is a body of goodwill that needs to be nurtured if it is to be sustained.
And then there is the converse: public contempt in the UK is largely reserved from those who break the lockdown. A particular fury greets public leadership figures who ignore the rules that they themselves have made. While the Scottish government seems to have got away unscathed with its botched (or worse) handling of its hypocritical Chief Medical Officer’s behaviour, the UK government’s handling of the Cummings scandal seems to have cost it dearly: trust in government information fell sharply in its wake, among people of all political persuasions and none. On the other hand, the communal solidarity of people who have observed the rules for those who seek optouts has been deeply impressive.
One conclusion I draw from the research studies is that our online behaviour is providing social scientists and others with an awful lot of valuable data. These raises ethical issues which will be familiar to many of those who use data from social media and mobile device records.
But my wider conclusion is that the pandemic really is reshaping our social bonds. The early signs suggest trends that might simply be short term responses to particular circumstances. However, while lockdowns may come and go, social distancing will be around for some time. If so, it likely will have longer term effects on our behaviours which will include our interactions with others. My expectation is that there will be some negative impats on social capital and some positive, but at least as important will be some deep-rooted changes in the ways that social bonds are made, reinforced, and broken.
Usually one of the most crowded streets in the resort town of Whitby
I have a long-standing interest in social capital – that’s to say, the many different ways in which our social ties can serve as a resource. So the pandemic, and the common policy of social distancing as a way of reducing infections, raises some obvious issues. In particular, I’ve wondered about some simple but big questions.
How do our social ties affect our experiences of social distancing, and of the wider pandemic?
What effect is social distancing having on our social ties, and indeed on their value?
In the longer term, what is the role of social capital in recovery from Covid-19?
This post looks at the first of these questions; I’ll look at the others in the next couple of days. And given that social researchers have access to much pre-existing data, as well as some new data on the pandemic, it’s not surprsing that some research has already emerged, thouigh I am guessing that much of it has yet to be peer-reviewed.
All I can do here is offer a few examples of studies that seem to me robust enough to command attention; as a crude headline, the findings seem so far to be consistent with the view that social capital still matters, even in the midst of a global pandemic.
One study of two ‘hot spots’ in Italy and New York State points to evidence that online social ties are associated with the spread of the disease. Conversely, access to mediated social ties may help inhibit the disease: according to an analysis based on US data, while income level appears to be the main factor in explaining social distancing – with the rich more likely to distance than the poor – access to high-speed internet access also matters.
While distancing appears to be affected by trust in the media, it is also associated with political specific forms of media consumption, and by political cultures. In the USA, it seems that viewing Fox News reduced the propensity to stay at home. Meanwhile, according to another paper, areas that vote Republican stayed at home less than those which voted Democrat.
Another study slightly took me aback, this time on distancing and ethnicity. Drawing on data from Russia and the USA, the researchers found that people who lived in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods are more likely to observe distancing rules than those in more homogeneous areas. This finding is consistent with the broader literature on diversity, which tends to find that we are more likely to form ties with, and trust, people who are most like ourselves.
So, as in other areas of public health, social capital is something to be taken seriously, and it follows that policies which promote it can help slow the spread of infection. Conversely, policies which reduce social capital, and undermine its foundations, pose a risk to successful recovery from the pandemic. And policies which build bridges between people with different identities – political, cultural, ethnic, national -may be particularly important in the longer term.
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