Imagining How to Go On Among Educational Practices in a Time of Crisis

How are teachers’ and educators’ situated activities guided, restrained, and eventually determined as they unfold in everyday practice? How do teachers plan and execute their teaching, and how do they, for instance, make decisions about (not) using digital technologies? How can their (professional) course of action be understood? To answer these questions, this chapter explores the role played by imagination in situated educational practices. Paying attention to the role of imagination and how actors anticipate future events and circumstances by deliberating possible courses of action in situated practice is crucial to understanding how practices are enacted and how an activity is eventually played out. Imagination thus becomes an important element in understanding both the continuity and change in the flow of activity as actors deliberate on how to go on in appropriate ways to achieve their goals and objectives. This discussion revolves around a problematic situation of university teaching encountered by one of the authors of the chapter during the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns.