Betwixt and Between: Liminality in Teacher’s Lives and in the Pandemic

Abstract

The pandemic has altered the ways educators carry out their work, having forced them to switch en masse in March, 2020 to online instruction and then to various combinations of online and hybrid instruction. Along with educational policy-makers, classroom educators and school leaders wonder when education will return to normal and the degree to which educational normal will look like it did prior to the Covid-19 pandemic. Educating during a pandemic fits the anthropological concept of liminality, of being between two states (introduced by van Gennep in 1909). After noting the origins and meaning of the concept of a liminal time or liminality and some Biblical examples of liminality, the article reviews three specific liminal times and spaces in educators’ careers: the tension some educators experience between church and academy, career transitions, and the transition from face-to-face instruction to online learning. The authors offer strategies educators can use to support their passage through each of those three liminal times and spaces.