Alternative Forms of Laboratory Teaching during the Lockdown Period Caused by the COVID-19 Pandemic

This article deals with problematics of laboratory learning in the state of total lockdown of educational institutions which was caused by COVID-19 pandemic. Schools in the Czech Republic have been operating in a special regime for more than a year, when most students and pupils cannot directly participate in school teaching, which results in significant changes in the way teaching is organized. There is a significant application of various forms of e-learning and schools use the concept of blended learning, however, practical teaching in laboratories and workshops was particularly hard hit. When replacing student experimental work in laboratories, teaching with the help of virtual laboratories is the strongest. Due to the general irreplaceability of real physical experience of pupils, various combined forms of teaching are used, where only a part of pupils work in the school, so as to minimize the risk of spreading the infection, but these pupils take turns in laboratories. Furthermore, some teachers try to design students' home experiments, in the implementation of which the principles of design-based learning and project-based learning are strongly applied. In this article, substitute teaching of laboratories in subjects such as physics, chemistry or electrical engineering in schools is mapped and evaluated, special emphasis is placed on high schools with curriculum focused towards technics and engineering. It is in these schools that the approach to teaching known as design-based learning is very well applied and the students of some selected schools were able to work on home experiments. It was this form of substitute teaching that proved to be the most effective. © 2022 by the authors.

Covid-19 and the genealogies of biopolitics: A pandemic history of the present

In this paper we approach the COVID-19 pandemic through the genealogical analysis of biopolitics. We recognize two key discontinuities in the genealogy of biopolitics. First, we have the transformation of the “old biological regime” and the emergence of the gaze as a technology of power/knowledge. This was essentially the epoch of the birth of biopolitics, and the period when life “entered” the sphere of politics. We then note the emergent discontinuity in biopolitical technologies today, during the pandemic of COVID-19, as we are witness to the transformations of biopolitical measures on the global scale. We also recognize important lessons from the genealogy of biopolitics as a “history of the present”. During just one historical epoch, biopolitics emerged as the power over life. That was the period of the so called “epistemic break” and the emergence of life as the new dynamic force of productivity, power, trade, cities, urbanization, population, and capitalism. This is how the risk that was once the base of “life function” instability became the central problem of biopolitics. It is the same concern of biopolitics today, but in completely novel social settings. © 2020, Sociological Association of Serbia. All rights reserved.