PRESENTATION

Lessons from the Pandemic

In March 2020, most schools were faced with the dilemma of having to close their doors and, at the same time, continue to function, keeping students and teachers confined to their homes. This dilemma deeply conditioned the 2019-2020 and 2020-2021 academic years.

Although the idea of distance learning is not new, the need for its sudden generalization, at the scale of educational systems, caught everyone by surprise, with the experiences accumulated over decades, involving means such as the post office, radio, television and, more recently, digital platforms and mobile devices.

Equally little use was found in the huge collection of academic texts, including those published in the most influential scientific journals, on the various heteronyms of distance education, to help teachers in their new role of being present only virtually. And most of the time, lack of skills and indispensable technical means.

Foto: Ricardo Almeida - everydaycovid

The applications to support online videoconferencing were useful to us, and even so, in an unequal way: in addition to the issue of skills, access to the network, both by students and teachers, was not the same, including the lack of signal in some homes and, in many cases, the impossibility for families to pay the price of essential equipment.

Not to mention the new organization of teaching work, in which teachers were forced to mix their professional lives with their private ones, as they were forced to work in their own homes, where they were confined with their families. In other words, there were homes where each of the parents carried out their professional activity remotely and their children attended online classes or simply required attention, in often cramped spaces. There were teachers pushed into burnout situations. In addition, to all this, the fact that the state has offloaded the responsibility for most of the operating costs of the “new” online school onto the families.

Although the usual school, that is, our old known factory school, has returned, the post-pandemic situation has yet to be addressed: what have we all learned from the nightmare we had to face?

Carlos Nogueira Fino e Ana França Kot-Kotecki (Organizers)