Pandemic and the remote school for children in the literacy phase in Brazil

contrasting scenarios

Abstract

The objective of the article is to understand the communicational mediation strategies adopted by different schools in conducting teaching activities for children entering the 1st Year of Elementary School in 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Through a qualitative methodological approach, individual in-depth interviews were carried out with pedagogical teams from three schools (one from the state network, one from the municipal network, and one from the private network), and with three families linked to the respective institutions. The comparative study is inspired by the action research carried out from March to November 2020 by Laboratório de Pesquisas da Comunicação nas Infâncias, created in the project “Comunicação e Infância (2016-2021)” at the “Escola de Comunicação, Artes e Design da Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul” in partnership with the “Centro Marista de Promoção dos Direitos das Crianças e do Adolescente e a Fundação Irmão José Otão” in “Porto Alegre-RS, Brasil, which served as a basis for identifying and understanding the experiences lived by the subjects in different contexts from the focus on the beginning of the literacy process. Various impacts can be identified in these scenarios, especially related to socioeconomic factors. In general, it is possible to associate the school dropout and dropout rate triggered at that time with different availability and types of technological resources for the continuity of classes in remote mode in each school community.