The Teaching work and the covid-19 pandemic

a national investigation with elementary high school teachers

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze how Basic Education teachers in Brazil were affected by the Covid-19 world pandemic, in particular by the need for social isolation that led to the adoption of remote (virtual) teaching. Thus, a nationwide survey was carried out by filling out an electronic form between April and June 2020, which yielded responses from teachers of all educational levels in almost all Brazilian federative units, except for one. The article is a part of the larger research and specifically addresses the sample of 3,519 teachers of Elementary and High Schools and analyzes how they experienced the beginning of the pandemic, paying particular attention to working conditions, knowledge of technological resources and the interface with the housework. From this, it was possible to see how teachers felt they were working more than normal in the remote regime, while they needed to learn a whole range of new resources, since a significant part did not traditionally use such resources in teaching activities. In addition, it was noted that many teachers work at more than one educational level and, even though they considered themselves well-equipped in terms of internet access, they considered their knowledge of technologies to be only average and most had never taken a virtual class before the pandemic. Finally, the data also show how gender issues are presented to teaching work and reproduce conditions of excessive domestic work and care for women teachers in general.