1 Introduction

As of 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, everyone needed to adapt and readapt to the measures to prevent the spread of the disease. It was no different in schools, which needed to carry out their activities in order to reach students, even though many of them did not have access to equipment and to the Interne.

In Ariquemes, Rondônia (RO), Brazil, in-person activities in schools returned in August 2021, in a hybrid way, alternating in-person activities with classes online and/or handouts. It was during this period that the teachers began to carry out the diagnoses and have a greater understanding of the students' learning levels.

Before the pandemic, according to data presented from the da Avaliação Nacional da Alfabetização (ANA), carried out in 2016, for classes in the 3rd year of elementary school, only 12.99% of participants managed to reach level 4 in reading, considered the desirable level; 21.74% were still at level 1, considered elementary (^{BRASIL, 2019}).

Regarding writing, the results show that only 8.28% reached level 5 (desirable) and 33.95% were at levels 1, 2 and 3, which are classified as insufficient. In Math proficiency, on a scale from level 1 to 4, where 1 is considered elementary and 4 is desirable, 22.98% were at level 1 and 27.11% at level 4 (^{BRASIL, 2019}).

Faced with these challenges presented, which include low levels of learning in reading, writing and Math and the need for social isolation during the pandemic, it is necessary to expand research that helps in understanding the concrete reality. From the knowledge of reality in its multiple determinations, it will become possible to envision new possibilities for action to overcome these challenges.

It is based on the assumption that the educational practices already used by teachers can reveal ways of acting that promote overcoming these challenges, by prioritizing a quality teaching and learning process. Quality is being understood based on the Historical-Cultural Approach (HCA), which argues that learning enables psychological development and enhances the formation of concepts (^{VYGOTSKI, 2000}). For this, it defends the use of pedagogical practices that encourage the appropriation of systematized knowledge in a dialectical movement that goes from syncresis to synthesis through the mediation of analysis (^{SAVIANI, 2011}).

In the teaching and learning process, the contents (systematized knowledge) and the forms (pedagogical practices) need to be thought of in an articulated way (^{SAVIANI, 2011}). So that there is an appropriation of knowledge capable of boosting psychic development, pedagogical practices are necessary that provide students' mental actions, among them, actions such as: thinking, analyzing, justifying and interpreting the concepts being studied.

Given the above, this article focuses on seeking answers to the following guiding question: what are the challenges and possibilities encountered by teachers of two classes of the 3rd year of a municipal public school in Ariquemes/RO when developing their pedagogical practices?

This work presents an excerpt from a larger research, which encompasses all municipal schools and elementary education in the urban perimeter of Ariquemes/RO. In this first moment, the data are from only two classes of the same school. The objective is to analyze the challenges and possibilities present in the educational practices developed with students of the 3rd year of elementary school in a municipal school in Ariquemes/RO.

For this, an empirical research was carried out with semi-structured interviews with two teachers of the 3rd year of elementary school at the same school. The research took place in August 2021, the same month in which there was a gradual return to in-person teaching, made possible by the expansion of vaccination in the city.

In the next topic, the methodological organization of the work will be clarified in a more specifically, and then the analyzes and results of the research will be presented.

2 Methodology

The research will be methodologically based on historical and dialectical materialism, which supports the HCA. Such bases understand human activity as a social practice and a criterion of truth for scientifically elaborated knowledge. It also considers scientific interpretation as one of the activities of the social being.

Scientific research related to pedagogical practices leads us to theoretically analyze the teaching and learning processes adopted by teachers in their praxis. Therein lies the need to think beyond the initially observed appearances.

According to ^{Vygotski (1997)}, we must seek the explanatory principle to place the phenomena in a broader context. In this sense, explaining means establishing a connection between several facts or groups of facts, with a view to the process of knowing the object. It is always necessary to seek the dynamism of the historical process.

In the specific case of this research, it occurred in the first month of return to in-person classes, in a moment of school and social readaptation in general. The research was qualitative and took place from an instrument for data collection/production: the semi-structured interview.

The interviews were organized with a brief characterization of the research subjects, questions about their education and training and more specific questions about the practices used in the planning and execution of classes. In addition to the questions in the script, during the course of the interview, other questions and requests for clarification arose.

The research locus school has six teachers of the 3rd year of elementary school, and the interviews were carried out with two of them. The choice of teachers was made by the local coordinator, based on acceptance and willingness to participate. They were asked to choose a fantasy name so as not to be identified and they opted for Rosa and Maria.

The interviews with teachers Rosa and Maria were pre-scheduled, carried out in person, using a cell phone, so that they could be recorded in audio. The option for recording is that the person interviewed would have complete freedom to express themselves without being interrupted, since in writing it would not be possible to have this same conditions. After the interviews, the information was transcribed to facilitate the analysis process.

The interviews were carried out at the school where the teachers work and in their respective classrooms, after the end of the class, when the children had already left. Before the interviews, the participating teachers read and signed the Free and Informed Consent Term written by the interviewing team, in which all the legal and ethical terms of the research were presented.

3 Results and discussion

In this topic, the data collected in the field research will be analyzed through semi-structured interviews with the two teachers. The data will be discussed from education theorists who are based on the HCA and understand that good teaching is the one that promotes psychic development, especially the development of higher psychic functions (^{Vygotski, 1996}). Such functions are specifically human, such as: logical memory, creative imagination, voluntary attention, concept formation, among others.

Both teachers interviewed are pedagogues, who have a lato sensu graduate degree and experience in the teaching career. Rosa has been a teacher for 33 years, has been working in the literacy cycle for nine years and currently teaches a class of 26 students.

Teacher Maria has been in the teaching career for 14 years, she has also been in the literacy cycle, however, she explains that she always works with students from the 2nd year onwards, because she considers the 1st year a transition process, and, since the school opens this option, she says she prefers it that way. She currently teaches a class of 24 students.

It should be clarified that, in this school, the literacy cycle works as follows: the teacher teaches a class in the 1st year and goes until the 3rd year accompanying it, that is, she works as a teacher of the same class from the 1st to the 3rd year, except for some cases, as teacher Maria. Both like this organization of the literacy cycle. According to teacher Rosa, this facilitates the teacher's work, since she already knows the limitations and potential of the children.

When asked whether they use the theoretical and practical knowledge acquired during their training (undergraduate and graduate) in their pedagogical practices, there were divergences in the answers given by the interviewed teachers. Professor Rosa said that she uses theoretical knowledge, however in parts, since, according to her, there is a distance between theory and practice. According to the teacher, in theory everything is “practical”, but the reality in the classroom is different, since it lacks adequate structure, materials and many other requirements that make it impossible to apply everything that was acquired in academic training.

Maria (2021) reports that everything she saw in academic and continued education systematically contributed to her pedagogical practices, such as:

Help each student in their particularity, adapt to the student. The student does not have to adapt to the teacher. It is the teacher who has to adapt to the student, because each one has a specific difficulty. And post-graduation only came to contribute [...] a little more to our practice in the classroom.

Regarding the training promoted by the government, both teachers confirmed that they participate and understand that they are of great importance. According to Maria (2021), “ [...] through these training courses, we end up learning new ways of teaching in the classroom, putting them into practice to be sure of what works and what doesn't. This will help the teacher to adapt to their practice”. She also refers to the need to deepen the contents of initial formation.

According to the teachers, there have been some changes in the training offered by the government, but they envision such changes in a different way. For Rosa, the training is no longer innovative and became just revisions of what they had previously learned. Maria (2021) said that this change added values, such as " [...] ways of enriching the learning process, of guiding the teacher in the care of children ", and made reference to the Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC).

Then came the BNCC. The BNCC came for us to continue these learnings, through training; adding more disciplines, guiding how to assist these children, which will help them more in the classroom. So, the BNCC came to add value. It came to help the teacher improve practice in the classroom. So there was this change. In addition to training, the BNCC came to contribute even more. (TEACHER MARIA, 2021).

For one of the teachers, there was regression, because, according to her opinion, it stopped being innovative, while for the other there was an improvement by bringing up subjects not covered in initial training, such as the BNCC. It is possible that teacher Rosa, with her 33 years of experience, considers training “without innovation” and “repetitive” precisely because the BNCC has a technical foundation. The authors who are based on the HCA make harsh criticisms and explain that technicality in education disregards the theoretical knowledge of teachers, historically built on a scientific basis, based only on the technical competence of doing.

This is what ^{Sena (2019}, p. 26) points out, when they says that both BNCC and BNC-training, “[...] disregard the theoretical foundations of initial training and impose 'what and how to teach' on teachers, [ ...] ignores their training, their knowledge, their intellectual and pedagogical autonomy”. In this sense, the teacher's scientific knowledge ceases to be a priority during their training, making them “[...] just a practical advisor determined by the teaching programs, by the software, which will tell you what to teach, how to teach and when to teach” (^{SENA, 2019}, p. 26).

For ^{Lima (2019}, p. 60), there are countless problems that appear when considering what was implemented by the BNCC; as an example, the author mentions the “[...] standardization of content, without taking into account the socioeconomic, cultural, landscape diversity in Brazilian territory”. And he adds that, given the situation, “[...] the loss of didactic-pedagogical autonomy of teachers in relation to the contents is clear”.

The survey was carried out during the pandemic, when students were returning to schools in person, after a year and a half of remote activities. During the period of remote activities, several adaptations were necessary so that the learning process of these children was not permanently interrupted, since the children had to leave school. In this pandemic context, with social isolation, the BNCC and its standardization of content are even more inefficient, since they have generated numerous gaps, especially among the less favored classes.

Faced with this situation, we took the opportunity to make some inquiries to the teachers about this atypical situation. When asked about the biggest challenges facing children in this period and how the activities were carried out, they replied that the biggest difficulties were linked to the lack of access to technologies.

For many children, this lack of access was related to the lack of financial resources, mainly due to their parents not being at home during the classes, since many of them used their parents' cell phones to attend classes, making online classes unfeasible. Another difficulty highlighted was the lack of credibility of many parents, as they thought that this type of online class had no effect on their children's learning.

The parents' lack of didactic-pedagogical knowledge is what drives the lack of credibility in the activities proposed by the teachers. The various practices adopted by teachers, in general, must be systematically organized with objectives in the teaching and learning process. ^{Silvestre and Barbosa (2022}, p. 12) state that “[...] an intentionality aimed at a specific purpose is necessary that will subsidize the game or game to solve a problem concerning the relationships that man establishes with knowledge science, making learning possible”.

Such games are often not understood by parents as an educational practice capable of boosting the development of students' psychic functions. For teachers who have professional technical knowledge, these practices are planned with well-defined objectives.

The teachers also explained that, during the period of social distancing, each teacher defined their online class days with synchronous attendance for the classes. One of the teachers said that she taught online classes two days a week, and the other reported that she taught them three days a week. The other days of the week were reserved for individual consultations, planning, posting classes with explanatory videos of activities and preparation of handouts, which were collected by parents at school.

In addition to the handouts, it was necessary for the teachers to prepare the explanations, since the plans did not have the explanations, they only indicated what was the activity to be carried out, and, many times, these activities were those of the children's books. In the morning, there was parallel recovery for those children who had more difficulties. As in normal times (before the pandemic), these activities were in the opposite period of classes; during the pandemic, they followed the same pattern.

According to teacher Rosa, at these opposite times, when requested, she also assisted those children who could not attend classes at their due time due to lack of internet, because they could not access the application, or who could not understand the activities.

As explained by Rosa (2021), “[…] it was not an easy experienc ”. She said that she couldn't wait to get back to normal, because she considered it more exhausting than in-person teacging, even causing health problems, due to the excessive use of cell phones, and it was necessary to resort to medical treatments.

The teacher's illness is not exclusive to pandemic times, but something that has been present in teaching work for a long time. ^{Souza et al. (2022)} warn, in their studies, about the expansion of evidence regarding teachers' illness associated with their working conditions. They highlight that the previously identified comorbidities were accentuated in the context of remote work:

In concrete terms, there was acceleration and pressure in the sequence of activities developed; excessive use of digital technologies for lesson planning; video recording; transfer and correction of works; and relational difficulties. All this under the sole responsibility of the teachers. (^{SOUZA et al., 2022}, p. 5).

In addition to acceleration and pressure in activities, the authors identified the performance of parallel and concurrent activities by teachers, work impediments due to the limitation of the technological tools themselves and the constant interaction between teaching and domestic work as aggravating factors for the mental illness of teachers during the pandemic (^{SOUZA et al, 2022}).

The pandemic has not only affected people's health, but has negatively contributed to several other aspects. In the field of education, it has contributed to greater social inequality in the lives of students, with those who do not have financial conditions being more affected, making access to systematized knowledge even more difficult. The pandemic hampered teaching work in general due to the difficulty in accessing students and the difficulty in appropriating the tools and format of remote teaching.

^{Barros and Vieira (2021}, p. 1) explain that “[...] education can be understood as appropriation of culture that was produced by a human being and the school, the place of production of knowledge”; with the pandemic, this access to the place of production of knowledge was seriously compromised, affecting the social classes most devoid of financial assets, given that, for this, access to the internet and the handling of technological equipment were necessary.

This problem led to difficulties in accessing students and dependence on parents for the development of pedagogical practices, mainly because these were children who depended on their parents for monitoring and for the availability of technological resources. In addition to being overworked, this caused frustration for the teachers, as they themselves pointed out.

As highlighted by ^{Libâneo, Suanno and Almeida (2022}, p. 3):

For the school to reach its purpose, teachers are required to master the knowledge they are responsible for teaching, to organize teaching according to student learning, and to take into account the individual and social characteristics of students and the sociocultural factors that act in learning.

The frustrations of the researched teachers are related to the difficulty in fulfilling the purpose of the school due to the social isolation imposed by the pandemic. As much as the strain was greater, they could not access students as before and were dependent on technology and parents.

When asked about the organization of planning, the teachers clarified that they have a specific period for this and that they carry it out together with the other 3rd year teachers, following the same pattern adopted before the pandemic. In the period of social isolation, it started to be done online and with the distribution of subjects among the teachers.

For them, online planning gave better quality to the classes, because ideas were shared by all through applications such as: Google Meet, Zoom and WhatsApp, enriching the construction of the teaching plan. Quality in a lesson plan is essential for the children's learning process, with the possibility, according to ^{Galvão, Lavoura and Martins (2019}, p. 144), of “[...] organizing, systematizing and carrying out the better ways of teaching”.

Collectively constructed planning represents many possibilities for improvements in the teaching and learning process, as long as it considers the knowledge already appropriated by students and is prioritized as a collective construction, and not as a division of work in a non-dialogued way.

^{Sforni (2015)} points out that, when thinking about promoting meaningful learning, one should take into account what students already know. When seeking to develop new knowledge, teachers need to know how to “[...] select contents and define ways of approaching them” (^{SFORNI, 2015}, p. 384). Likewise, ^{Silva and Libâneo (2021)} defend working with scientific concepts in constant dialogue with students' everyday concepts, considering them in their concrete historical, social and cultural relationships in everyday practice.

Still according to ^{Sforni (2015)}, when thinking about the ways of approaching the contents, in a way that they develop the superior psychic functions, the teacher needs to instigate the attention of the students regarding the proposed activity. Need to plan actions that promote the activation of attention, perception, memory, reasoning, imagination and feeling.

This activation is directly linked to the teacher's planning. When planning the activities, he must devise ways to develop these actions in the students, since " [...] each activity chosen or elaborated by the teacher must be analyzed in its potential for the mobilization of psychic functions" (^{SFORNI, 2015}, p. 384).

When questioned about which pedagogical practices they would like to develop with their students and could not, only teacher Rosa stated that she had. For her, the practice that she could not develop was parallel recovery, having attributed the difficulty to the parents, for not understanding its importance and thinking that the available time is insignificant for the child to learn something. According to the teacher:

Parallel recovery is a child's right; we know it would help a lot, especially those children who have difficulties. Why can't I develop? It's just that parents often don't bring their children to do these parallel recoveries because it's at the opposite time and it only lasts two hours. So, they think that bringing the child in at that time for only two hours is not going to help the child to develop, since it's just the teacher and the child. When I could work on motor coordination and work on several things that we see that the child cannot do, cutting with scissors, the child cannot jump a rope, the child does not know what a right side and a left side are, so, all this will interfere with their reading, writing, developing in the classroom. If the parents brought their children for this parallel recovery, it would greatly advance the child's side in the classroom and it is one of the things that we find it very difficult to put into practice. (ROSA, 2021).

The opportunity for individualized teaching can make a lot of difference in the child's teaching and learning process. It can allow them to understand certain knowledge that, in the classroom, along with the other students, they had not yet been able to internalize. Also in this service, difficulties can be overcome with the full attention of the teacher and his work directed to the needs of the student.

Concerning the organization of the pedagogical practice that meets the different levels of learning, teacher Rosa (2021) said that she used the diagnosis and, after this diagnosis, separated the children by hypothesis: from pre-syllabic to alphabetic, in the five levels. Thus, according to her, it is easier to work on the activities with the children, assisting them by relevant groups to which they belong. According to her, she placed these children closer to each other in groups separated by hypothesis, to facilitate the teacher's work.

Teacher Maria (2021) said that she did adapted activities, as head teachers, managers and the teacher of the resource room work side by side, and this partnership facilitates planning; further stated:

[...] the resource room teacher, who is the one who is most on my side, meeting the needs of that child, she, more than anyone else, can know more about what that child needs, so she is always guiding and participating in our planning. (TEACHER MARIA, 2021).

For ^{Libâneo (2016}, p. 358), human development takes place through “[...] social interaction between those who teach and those who learn, which is why forms of coexistence and cooperation are essential means of learning”. This should be used both among teachers and among students with their different learning levels.

This mode of educational intervention, considering the levels of development of the subject who learns and, at the same time, the expansion of this development, means that teachers need to investigate knowledge that students already have or those that are about to emerge if they are stimulated, so that he can provide them with his own knowledge and help them to surface this imminent knowledge and qualitatively expand their learning. (^{LIBÂNEO, 2016}, p. 357).

Making this diagnosis is a basic requirement of the teacher who aims at the qualitative advancement in the development of the child's abilities, which is not an easy task, given that the classroom is made up of students with varied knowledge, however, when thinking about an education that promotes good development, this identification is necessary.

A survey about the knowledge and skills of each student, with the aim of knowing what is common to the class and evaluating its current and potential development, offers the teacher the possibility of acting collectively, without this constituting a denial of the specificity of development of each student. (^{SFORNI, 2015}, p. 384).

When thinking about the students' development in the learning process, this diagnosis becomes non-negotiable, and it is through it that the teacher can know what the students learned from the activities, as well as identify what they are having difficulties with, so that they can intervene helping them to overcome. For this, the focus should not be the separation and classification of students, but the cooperation between them.

According to Rosa (2021), using the practice of diagnosis in the classroom with children is of paramount importance both for student learning and for the work to be developed by the teacher. The diagnosis is highlighted as an evaluation process in which the teacher must identify what the children already know in order to then define what the content proposals and subsequent activities will be.

In addition to the diagnosis, both teachers considered efficient in the children's learning in the classroom: the textual rewriting, the conversation circles, the reading aloud by the teacher and the organization of planning in the format of projects and didactic sequences.

The planning of teaching practices must always consider the possibilities for students to work on their mental actions. ^{Sforni (2015)} points out that there are ways of approaching that are more decisive in student learning, since they demand more from them. Among them, the author says that “follow the model”, “define”, “exemplify”, “list” are less effective in the psychic development of children than instructions such as “[...] explain, analyze, justify, demonstrate and argue” (^{SFORNI, 2015}, p. 384). According to ^{Sforni (2015)}, the latter demand more from students, contributing significantly to the activation of higher psychic functions, because they will demand investigation, argumentation and research from them. To resolve these actions, it is necessary to perform mental actions beyond mechanical copying, because they require actions from students in which they have to express themselves, and this requires mental organization and deepening of language.

According to ^{Silva and Libâneo (2021}, p. 702), it is up to teaching to “[...] promote the means that ensure the appropriation, by the student, of this historically and socially elaborated human experience, in order to promote qualitative advances in the development of human capabilities”.

5 Final considerations

In this article, the proposal was to analyze the challenges and possibilities present in the educational practices developed with students of the 3rd year of elementary school in a municipal school in Ariquemes/RO. For this, semi-structured interviews were conducted with two teachers from the same school.

It was possible to identify that educational practices during the pandemic were very challenging for teachers due to the barriers imposed on direct contact with students, the intensification of work and dependence on parents for the development of activities, in addition to the technological devices that they needed to master to carry out your work.

In addition to the challenges, the teachers highlighted that they use the diagnosis of students' learning levels as an educational practice of fundamental importance for directing the teaching work. This is one of the possibilities for action to overcome the challenges present in the teaching and learning process in the 3rd year. Another possibility is to carry out individualized assistance at the opposite time to that of regular classes for those with greater difficulties.

From the data provided by the teachers, it is possible to have a dimension of how the teaching and learning process was during social isolation and to have a dimension of the challenges of teachers in in-person return. The direct contact with the students and the possibility of carrying out the teaching work represent an encouragement for the teachers after a period of so many frustrations.

In this historical moment of return and the search for overcoming the damage caused in the appropriation of knowledge by students, collective efforts will be necessary in the selection of curricular contents and in the planning of ways of working with such contents in order to activate the psychic functions of the students. students.

It was found that the teachers make use, in the classroom, of theoretical knowledge acquired in their academic training, both undergraduate and postgraduate and training promoted by the goverment. However, improvements are still needed in these courses and qualifications so that they meet the concrete needs of the teaching and learning process.

Knowing reality in its dynamism is essential to plan actions and envision possibilities for action at school, whether by the teachers themselves or by researchers in the area. In research on social practice, in addition to the challenges, it is possible to find elements already carried out by teachers that can serve as a basis for analyzes and for the struggle to implement educational policies aimed at overcoming these existing challenges.

It is necessary to fight for educational policies that prioritize the appropriation of knowledge and that give good conditions of access to children of the working class, as this will enable them to offer better conditions for basic education. It is important to emphasize that we cannot assign only teachers the task of improving teaching conditions, as this stems from the way society is organized and needs to be modified to guarantee better working conditions for them.