Building a Plane While Flying

Abstract

We use the metaphor of building a plane while flying to describe the enactment of educational policies by teachers during COVID-19 and the impact of these policies on their ability to meet the needs of their students. Drawing from a series of three one-hour focus groups with seven teachers in Alberta, we apply critical policy analysis to describe the transition of public schools to pandemic education, especially in urban centers. This paper will begin by reviewing the dynamic policy context of school closures and reentry strategies and proceed to outline the diverse ways school boards interpreted guidelines from the Ministry of Education. We discuss the frustration with and variation of policy enactment during the pandemic, especially with respect to priorities and barriers to addressing student wellbeing and access to educational and social supports. Finally, we describe the consequences of teaching through crisis as it emerges in a political context that has failed to respond to educator’s professional needs.

Heroic Coding: A New Method for Apocalyptic Scenarios

“…Although they did not receive the same ovations, the education workers had something in common with them: they ended their workdays exhausted but without the desire to give up their mission. This mixture of feelings became understandable when we faced the metaphor proposed by Farhadi and Winton (2021) [There is a silence of about 10 seconds]. I keep thinking about it, and sometimes my mom looks at me and asks: "Hey, are you here?"…”

“…Although they did not receive the same ovations, the education workers had something in common with them: they ended their workdays exhausted but without the desire to give up their mission. This mixture of feelings became understandable when we faced the metaphor proposed by Farhadi and Winton (2021): educating during a pandemic means building an airplane while we fly. Martina, one of the participants of our research project, inscribes this metaphor in her personal life:…”

A spiderweb of human trafficking: An empirical linguistic study

“…As an applied area of research, metaphors are a source for moderating social behaviours and public opinion, establishing meaningful links with the law (Hanne & Weisberg 2018) and economics (Zhu 2023), psychology (Landau et al 2011;De Saint Preux & Blanco 2021), ecology (Rapport 1995;Currie & Clarke 2022;Pottinger et al 2022), cross-border security and migration (De Backer & Enghels 2022), military affairs (Al-Muttairi 2022), media communications (Flusberg et al 2018;Hullman & Kwiatkowski 2021), and education (Farhadi & Winton 2021;Spours et al 2022), etc. Metaphors are also viewed as a key to problems when traditional methods do not meet the needs, for instance, in the social care field, or any other domain where enhanced impact on public opinion is required to tackle socially relevant issues.…”