Care and Complexity: Designing for Holistic Understandings of and within a Pandemic

ABSTRACT

The COVID-19 pandemic spans multiple systems and dimensions - social, scientific, emotional, and axiological. This paper describes the collaborative design process of an elementary-age program addressing COVID-19, systems thinking, and photography from this multi-dimensional perspective. With the COVID-19 pandemic as both curricular content and design context, an educational design emerged that includes care as the centerpiece of both design structure and process. Using an ethnographic approach, we outline the evolution of the curricular theme - from relationships, to protection, to care - and how this theme is realized in our design. Through a perspective of care, we consider what it means to include socio-emotional elements in systems thinking, specifically axiological considerations. This paper contributes to the need for educational designs that consider COVID-19 from multiple dimensions, to understandings of how collaborative processes can shape design, and to (re)theorizations of systems thinking in the learning sciences. © ISLS.