The “new normal” in school: challenges reported by two Brazilian literacy teachers

Abstract

This paper aims at problematizing the “new normal” in Education in the period in which distant teaching and face-to-face teaching coexisted in the pandemic, from the methodological perspective of research-formative meetings. Thus, reports of aspects that explain the success/failure of the new educational context written by two literacy teachers who taught second graders from May to December 2021 were analyzed. Resulting data denounced that the “new normal” led to the following: need to simultaneously assist students who started to attend in-person classes and the ones who kept attending online classes, with planning overlap and time spent on the tasks; need to fill out the virtual platform created by the sponsoring institution which requires lesson plans, roll calls and material sent through the application, making a large part of teaching become bureaucratic; teachers paying for equipment, mobile data, internet connections and self-education, since the State had exempted itself from them; instability at work due to the fact that the school could open and close in case of virus contamination and generate anxiety, uncertainty and frustration; and differences in quality of teaching in online and in-person classes that would result in inequality in students’ assistance and learning. All factors led to work overload which was aggravated by the lack of formative processes and infrastructure conditions to enable both online and in-person classes to take place throughout the pandemic.