Pandemic Learning: Remapping the Classroom Space

In her memoir, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit writes, “Never to get lost is not to live, not to know how to get lost brings you to destruction, and somewhere in the terra incognita lies a life of discovery” (14). We have been living in something of a terra incognita—an unexplored, uncharted space—since the middle of March 2020. “Never to get lost is not to live,” Solnit says, but what happens when we are in a constant state of the unfamiliar? And what if we are confined to familiar spaces that must be remapped to accommodate different kinds of exploration? This paper—part personal and pedagogical reflection and part scholarly exploration of the ideological implications of space—considers how the pandemic and its safety protocols of masking and social distancing, sheltering in place and quarantining along with the tools of online learning have altered educational spaces and made the familiar unfamiliar. The resulting disorientation requires us to remap these spaces and find new tools of navigation in order to pursue the educational “life of discovery.”