Paper short abstract:

Leveraging Vavrus’ (2021) concept of “schooling as uncertainty,”, this research examines Lebanese teachers' ability to respond to unfolding, intertwined, and ongoing local crises, highlighting the need to interrogate education as certainty while also attending to local precarities and conflicts.

Paper long abstract:

The title for this article comes from an interview with a school principal in Beirut on October 27, 2021. He spoke of the challenges his school, city, and country faced in the past few years. The extreme devaluation of the Lebanese lira (LL) in 2019, which had been pegged at 1,515 LL to 1 USD for 30 years, and has since lost 90% of its value. The Beirut port blast on 4th of August, 2020—one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history that pulverized the port and damaged half of the city, killing 218 people, wounding 7,000, and displacing 300,000 residents from their homes. The lockdowns imposed by the global COVID-19 pandemic shut down the poorest schools and separated the most vulnerable students from critical resources and integral educational opportunities. Basic necessities including food, clean water, life-saving medicines, electricity, and fuel are dwindling and increasingly out of reach, especially for those who cannot afford black-market prices. Lebanon is and continues to be in crisis, with no clear end in sight. Leveraging Vavrus’ (2021) concept of “schooling as uncertainty,” this research questions the ways that readily accepted assumptions of schooling as certitude and emancipation fail to consider the precarity that comes with banal ordinariness of crisis. This work seeks to understand the ways in which teachers respond to unfolding, intertwined, and ongoing local crises, highlighting the need to interrogate education as certainty or progress while also attending to the ways that teachers make sense of local precarities, histories, and conflicts.