Did the pandemic durably change our pedagogy in International Relations (IR), or were pandemic-induced changes only temporary measures with which we have since dispensed?

This is an open question and not one I can conclusively answer here, but this is on my mind as I am writing a new preface and concluding chapter for the second edition of a volume I edited, Pandemic Pedagogy: Teaching International Relations amid COVID-19.

Perhaps the most systematic study of this question thus far comes from Rebecca A. Glazier and J. Cherie Strachan, who surveyed and facilitated focus groups of American Political Science Association (APSA) members.

Glazier and Strachan asked those APSA members an open-ended question on “the most important way that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed their teaching for the long term,” and they found that responses clustered into four main categories.

Respondents often indicated that their teaching had changed in terms of engagement strategies (e.g., introducing different kinds of classroom activities), technical skills (e.g., familiarity with videoconferencing software), empathy (e.g., relaxing deadlines, offering pass/fail assessment, or otherwise accommodating the difficult circumstances), and logistics (e.g., clarifying expectations or course organization through a learning management system).

Three years have already passed since the publication of Glazier and Strachan’s study, and it seems as good a time as any to revisit the question of whether the pandemic has had long-term effects on our teaching. I would tentatively suggest that the longest-lasting changes are likely to cut across their four categories in two ways.

First, as Glazier and Strachan note, the pandemic required everyone teaching at the time to learn (or deepen their familiarity with) new technologies. We all became much more familiar with videoconferencing software, online learning management systems, and the like. Those who taught during the pandemic are likely to have gained technical skills and become more deliberate about course logistics.

Second, many of us experimented in the classroom, often with the goal of maintaining classroom engagement in an online environment or in a desire to be empathetic to students living through the same crisis we were. It is likely that many such pedagogical experiments have since been discontinued. Some of these experiments, however, have likely stayed with us.

Here I am thinking of my own experience, which would suggest that mid-pandemic changes will vary in their stickiness. I first experimented with “ungrading” during the pandemic, and while I am constantly tweaking my approach, I have stuck with it. By contrast, I became more flexible with deadlines amid the pandemic but have since returned to more rigid deadlines (while typically being lenient in allowing short extensions).

All these changes, however, are tied to personal experiences of teaching in the pandemic. Any positive pedagogical changes wrought by the pandemic may thus be idiosyncratic and prone to dissipate as our distance from the pandemic increases and the professoriate changes.

In the long term, it seems to me, pandemic-induced pedagogical changes are vulnerable to being displaced by changes made in the wake of other disruptions—like those associated with the increasingly widespread availability of generative “artificial intelligence”. I don’t know that this is necessarily good or bad, but it would suggest that the pandemic’s long-term pedagogical effects may be rather muted.