The social function of school and conditions of human development in pandemic and post-pandemic times

Abstract

The present conditions of human development, including children's schooling processes, have been deeply affected by the coronavirus pandemic, Covid-19, at local and global levels, since the early 2020s. An exponential increase in the number of deaths, the imposition of social distance, unemployment, and the rapid impoverishment of families due to the worsening economic crisis have established new challenges, particularly in the context of Brazilian public education, deeply changing family-school relations. The resort to emergency remote education, often seen as the only alternative in the face of health restrictions, imposed new working and living conditions on teachers, children and their families. The difficulties many students and teachers have in accessing computers and internet, however, appeared as serious impediments to the implementation of formal teaching relationships. Experiencing such adverse conditions, a group of public school teachers has been meeting virtually for several months to collectively discuss, study, and analyze the concrete possibilities of carrying out the school work in a pandemic and post-pandemic context. The proposal inspired by the UN Research Roadmap for COVID-19 Recovery emerges, then, to foster the formalization of an intervention and investigation collective project, based on the work that has been done by teachers who are on the public "school floor", facing these conditions of restriction. Assuming, therefore, the theoretical and methodological anchoring of the cultural-historical perspective of human development, which has already been guiding the work of the group, the proposal presented here aims to explain and analyze, with the collective of teachers from public education networks, the concrete conditions experienced by them, in an attempt to understand how the conditions of human constitution were affected as a result of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. Assuming, therefore, the theoretical and methodological anchoring of the cultural-historical perspective of human development, which has already been guiding the group's work, the objectives of the proposal presented here are: 1. to make explicit, with the group of public school teachers, the concrete conditions they experience, in an attempt to understand how the conditions for the constitution of the human were affected as a result of the restrictions imposed by the pandemic; and 2. to substantiate and analyze the pedagogical practices being carried out. The methodological foundations imply several procedures and instruments for construction and registration of empirical data (participant observation, field diary entries, video and audio recordings, photographic records; document analysis, individual and group interviews, general and specific meetings with teachers and researchers involved). They also involve diverse analytical procedures: ethnographic inspiration (Geertz), discursive-enunciative analysis (Vygotsky, Bakhtin, Vloshinov), Clinic of Activity (Clot). Thus, the collaborative research can have repercussions in several educational instances, from classroom work to the proposition of public policies. Among the possible contributions, the following ones can be highlighted: 1. the mapping of the concrete teaching conditions; 2. the creation of new working conditions in schools; 3. the production of knowledge about the conditions and possibilities of human development and the social function of the school. (AU)