This return to the school environment has been so profound! When the school year started, back before the pandemic, we were different people. Social isolation has strongly impacted us in many ways. It was revealing to see how the school itself was missed, both by the adults and the children. That immense longing for friends, the daily back-and-forth, games, collective learning… for being in a place of sharing, full of energy, life and strength.
“Those who work in education never imagined a situation of being away from the school environment for nine months and much less that from one week to the next, we would need to adapt our curriculum for emergency remote education. A lot of has been going on throughout these months. A lot of anxieties, learning, research, making mistakes and celebrating successes, but we managed to overcome this challenge,” says Gabriela Fernandes, pedagogical coordinator for the Elementary School at be.Living.
Gabi says that now it is time to reestablish the school as the powerful physical space it is, to build knowledge and culture, to live symbolically, to share experiences and emotions and, above all, to welcome the children.
Covid-19 affected children’s behavior regarding emotions, interpersonal relationships and learning itself. Research conducted in other countries shows that many children and adolescents returned to school with reduced vocabulary and symptoms such as anxiety and irritability, in addition to difficulty in paying attention.
Gabriela explains that the excess hours of screen time cause children to have difficulty establishing concentration, which is fundamental to the learning processes. She also reminds us that the screen reduces the educational context, thereby reducing the strength of activities and studying. For her, the challenge of this partial on-site return is to come up with the pedagogical practices that are the most appropriate for all these issues that are coming to light.
“We are investing in reinforcement activities focused on the Portuguese and English languages and mathematics, so that we can evaluate how they learned during this period of distance learning and, mainly, in welcoming and retrieving experiences that lead children back into the school environment. The intention is a curriculum that drives the memory to the surface, as learning is the transformation of short-term memory into long-term memory. When something has meaning, the memory remains and it becomes learning.”
In practice, the elementary school boys and girls are resuming activities such as observation and recording, for example, which broaden the investigative stance and involve them in the essential process of education, which is to signify learning by forming memories that abide. And since memory is directly related to the field of emotions, activities that seek to reach the heart of children’s emotions cannot be left out.
“Games, music and activities that involve rhythm and body were our focus in the first two weeks after the return. Drawing, imagining, creating stories, reading, representing their own bodies, experiencing cultural situations, such as Halloween, for example. We are trying to make children return to experiencing school as it is: an environment of culture, coexistence, learning, being well and feeling comfortable with others. And always remembering that school is a common place for experiencing, in practice, the importance of collectivity, especially in current times. Learning that my actions are fundamental in maintaining the collective, that health protocols need to be followed by everyone so that we can keep coming together, that we are subjects of action and the actions of others. This is exactly what the school should represent.”
The coordinator concludes by saying that for the second moment of the partial on-site return, the idea is to extend how long the children remain at school, introducing more diagnostic and reinforcement activities, mainly in the areas of languages and mathematics, so that boys and girls feel safe and ready to start next year.