A Wake-Up Call: Equity, Inequality and Covid-19 Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning

Produced from experiences at the outset of the intense times when Covid-19 lockdown restrictions began in March 2020, this collaborative paper offers the collective reflections and analysis of a group of teaching and learning and Higher Education (HE) scholars from a diverse 15 of the 26 South African public universities. In the form of a theorised narrative insistent on foregrounding personal voices, it presents a snapshot of the pandemic addressing the following question: what does the ‘pivot online’ to Emergency Remote Teaching and Learning (ERTL), forced into urgent existence by the Covid-19 pandemic, mean for equity considerations in teaching and learning in HE? Drawing on the work of Therborn ( 2009 : 20–32; 2012 : 579–589; 2013 ; 2020 ) the reflections consider the forms of inequality - vital, resource and existential - exposed in higher education. Drawing on the work of Tronto ( 1993 ; 2015 ; White and Tronto 2004 ) the paper shows the networks of care which were formed as a counter to the systemic failures of the sector at the onset of the pandemic.