"Nunca pensei que uma abraço fizesse tanta falta": conversações pandêmicas com professoras do Ensino Superior

Abstract

With the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, many questions were asked about how our social, professional, and academic lives would unfold in the face of such a disastrous moment, in which many people were fighting for their lives. In the midst of this event, Emergency Remote Teaching was born, with the aim of mitigating the academic damage that the Covid-19 pandemic could cause and, as a result, the research that gave rise to this Course Completion Work. Thus, we defined as a research problem the way Higher Education teachers dealt with Emergency Remote Teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic and the objective was to know how Higher Education teachers lived Emergency Remote Teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic. To achieve this objective, we used conversation as a research methodology, when we dialogued remotely with five professors who work in Higher Education, linked to federal public universities in the North and Northeast of Brazil. The conversations were recorded in audio and video and later transcribed using a text editor. Regarding the presentation of data, we organized a discussion anchored in the two structuring axes of the work, namely: the pandemic of the new Coronavirus and Emergency Remote Teaching. With this, we seek to describe the processes triggered in each of these experiential contexts, based on conversations with the teachers and the recent theoretical production on the themes. From the point of view of data analysis, we highlight that the pandemic was a very challenging moment, when we had to adapt to a new way of living: based on technology and virtual reality. In such a scenario, we deal with feelings of loneliness, anguish, anxiety, and exhaustion, aggravated by work overload. Emergency Remote Teaching was a difficult period, in which we lived with little physical contact, lack of technological equipment and internet connection difficulties. It was necessary to invest our own financial resources to teach classes, in addition to learning on our own to use the technologies necessary for remote classes. Finally, we believe that we will come out of this scenario valuing the role of face-to face classes for human development, but also recognizing the possibilities of introducing technologies in our academic routine. Getting to know digital tools and criticizing them will allow us to take advantage of their potential in the best possible way in our teaching work.