In diagnoses of our time, crises - and how they overlap (Polycrises) - have become a central category to describe current and future societal conditions, as well as challenges and opportunities that educational systems worldwide need to (pro-)actively confront. These comprise, amongst others, the climate crisis, the energy crisis, the economic crisis, the diversity crisis (currently also in relation to digital bias), and the COVID-19 crisis. The threats and disruptions of these and other crises already have had and will bring further changes to the future of the individual, society, and the planet, as well as the systems of Education and their contexts. Crises need not only be seen as dystopian (external) events affecting systems but also in relation to their potential to initiate turning points for transformations and changes by social actors operating in different contexts. For example, personal and interactive crises can serve as starting points for learning and Education, especially when teachers accompany them well. We see Education and vulnerability as deeply intertwined. While Education in itself must be seen as a vulnerable social process since individuals need to change their current understanding of themselves, towards the world and one another, also the contexts in which Education takes place are highly volatile and vulnerable to external circumstances: The way in which processes of Education and Bildung are structured through policies and finance mechanisms bracket the experiences that teachers and students can make in these systems and thereby opening and limiting opportunities for dealing with and utilizing crises for their educational potential. In our symposium, we want to investigate the perspectives of students and adults who have been experiencing times of crisis not only in these already vulnerable educational contexts but also from a position of previous marginalization prone to reinforce prior, shift, or create new vulnerabilities. Educational Research conducted since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted and exacerbated existing inequalities in Education, especially for children and adults living under conditions of poverty, disability, and 'divergent' or non-European backgrounds. Yet, Research in which these groups' own perspectives on their perceptions of vulnerability have been the starting ground to investigate deeper contemporary structural issues of in/equality remain scarce. This symposium will shed light on this desideratum. We will take the COVID-19 pandemic as an example to embed and problematize those experiences. Not only do we want to give students the possibility to voice their experiences from their point of view, but we also want to investigate the contexts in which those experiences were generated, e.g., isolation, rules in children's homes, the provision of (educational) support and accommodative measures during school closures and lockdowns as well as their impact on students' possibilities to participate in online or remote ways of communication. In the symposium, we want to take a comparative perspective by investigating the situation in three European countries (Austria, Germany, and the United Kingdom) as well as Canada and see how far different approaches in dealing with the pandemic can be seen as reflections of how differing contexts address, thematize, react and adapt to situations of crisis in educational contexts. We want to show how these contexts differ not only in an international comparison but also within countries and societies themselves. Our Research also indicates that, albeit in fragile ways, crises can lead to new forms of individual and collective (political) agency and conscientization toward/equality and its social production amongst groups considered vulnerable. In that regard, Educational Research can serve a catalyzing function, raising various ethical and methodological issues and challenges, some of which will also be shared and discussed within this symposium.

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