Introduction

The tenuous differentiation between health and society has perhaps never been so fraught. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed our world, and in ways that we are only beginning to understand. Since the World Health Organization first declared COVID-19 to be a global pandemic on March 11, 2020 (they had already labeled it a “public health emergency of international concern” as early as January 30, 2020), there are now few, if any, people on the planet who have not in some way been impacted either directly by the virus itself or by the direct and indirect impacts of the associated pandemic. It is, with little argument, the pandemic that will mark a generation.

Education is often touted as the best way to advance one’s station in life and a critical means of producing informed members of society. The pandemic has significantly threatened those goals by not only temporarily disrupting education, but also by magnifying the factors that will lead to longer term disruptions. The scholarship in this volume takes a closer look at many of the issues at the heart of the educational process including teacher self-efficacy, the gendered and racialized impacts of the pandemic on education, school closures, and institutional responses.