There is a Chinese proverb that states: 'When the winds of change blow, some build walls. Others build windmills.' In the wake of COVID-19, where attention was concentrated on taking stock of systemic losses and progress undone, my doctoral research explores the experiences of schools that successfully built windmills when faced with adversity. My work attempts to understand the mechanisms behind how education can move beyond the notion of resilience, i.e., withstanding and recovering from crisis, and instead learn to harness crisis as an opportunity for organisational and systemic evolution in real time. In doing so, it asks: In a world facing interconnected, unpredictable, and compounding upheavals, can we learn not just to survive crisis, but find a way to grow from it?
University of Cambridge MPhil Education (EGID) 2020
The University of Edinburgh MA Social Policy (with SPS) 2019