Introduction

This text is born from an invitation to compose the panel entitled "School inclusion and the new post-pandemic demands" in the context of an activity that takes place annually at Universidade of Vale do Taquari: the Univates Inclusion Week.⁴. Considering the subject matter in question and the dialog that has developed, there was a latent feeling that it would be necessary to continue thinking together, deepening the debate, moving the thought. A pedagogue, a special education teacher and a psychologist, all researchers in the field of Teaching and Education for more than twenty years, met virtually to talk about.

Proposed from this invitation, we would also like this text to be meant as a practice for a united thought about the increasing of inequalities and the will to norm so visible in the present time, which strengthen the need to produce debates that tension the notions of childhood, inclusion and difference; defend the public school, and reaffirm the common life.

With the intention of discussing inclusion and exclusion practices produced in the context of remote education, seeking to problematize their effects in the schooling processes of those children returning to school, we organized the hereby proposed discussion into two sections. In the first, we discuss the processes of inclusion and exclusion experienced by children in the pandemic context, placing an emphasis on the processes of classification and normalization that objectify the childhood, dehumanizing it. In the next section, we bet on the power of the school as a space that assumes the difference as a principle and is effective as an environment in which attentive and sensitive listening promotes inclusion and acceptance.

Finally, we leave to the readers some questions that are the result of what we propose to discuss in this writing: that they can serve as triggers and sparks to continue thinking about the pandemic, post-pandemic and incoming times.

Inclusion, exclusion and childhood: elements to think about the pandemic

Of how many chasms is the word distance made? Although it has established itself intimately and habitually in our lives in the midst of the pandemic, do we understand the longitude that inhabit it? When six Brazilians hold a wealth equivalent to the sum of the country's poorest 100 million, how do we call that distance? When men choose women's bodies for domestic violence, how do we call that distance? When the population earning up to two minimum wages is made up of 80% black people, how do we call that distance? When children with disabilities face more difficulties staying in school than others, how do we call that distance? The distance here is the measure that protects the lives of the few, very few. It interposes vertically: It allows a small group to look from above to thousands of people and determine the hierarchy between the lives that matter and those that are dispensable. In this offer of the school for the moment are segregated all those who do not know or are not able to respond to the proposal. Is that reasonable? Who are these children and young people who are left behind? Among so many - from the peripheries, from rural communities, riverside communities, those living in environments of domestic violence, migrants or refugees - are also children with disabilities. Again. Those for whom the lesson plan is never thought of. Those for whom not even school enrollment is guaranteed. Those of whom competence is never presumed. Those whose right to be in a "common" school is still questioned. Those whose mothers do the utmost to adapt materials. Those of whom is thought have nothing to offer. Those who are seen as failures, sick, obstacles. Those whose presence at the school needs to be permanently negotiated. Those who are not seen, because there is always a report in the first place. (^{ROSA, 2020}, s/p).

The epigraph chosen to start this section, although long, presents elements that seem urgent to be discussed when we think about the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in childhood. We could choose here to propose a broad discussion about childhood, but we chose as the object of our problematizing, the children in school whose existence has been invisible and precarious, resulting in practices that dehumanize them. Children who, although under the focus of contemporary inclusive discourses, have been subjected to exclusion practices operated through medicalization actions for standardization purposes.

In pointing to the normalization practices, we cannot fail to consider this term as a very much proclaimed term in the fields through which we are traversed as researchers. For Pedagogy - and there, Special Education - and for Psychology, the concept of normal (and normality) has historically been imposed as a logic of normalization and ways of evaluating, classifying and, consequently, positioning subjects and truths about their relations. If we take from statistics the concept of norm, of the normal curve that applies as that point located in the mean of a curve, at its apex, we can understand that everything that is not there - at that point so rare and so difficult to reach, sometimes empty - is considered deviant.

Thus, as Machado de Assis illustrates in his beautiful writing The Alienist, the norm, at the end and finally, becomes an exception. After all, if someone gathers in oneself all possible qualities, all the supposed "normality", it is the one who needs to be treated as unusual, unbalanced. At the end of his best-known literary work, Machado de Assis decrees the incarceration of the alienist Simão Bacamarte in the famous Casa Verde, an institution which housed numerous fellow citizens of the village of Itaguaí considered alienated: "It was decisive. Simon Bacamarte bowed his head, both cheerful and sad, and even more cheerful than sad. Continuous act, he retreated to the Green House. In vain, wife and friends told him to stay, that he was perfectly sane and balanced [...]" (^{ASSIS, 2010}, p. 66). Thinking about this segregating institution that Assis presents us, could we risk attributing to the school a space and moment of childhood normalization in post-pandemic times?

Looking at the normalization practices in the specific field of childhood, we cannot fail to analyze the relationship that is established between the production of an abnormal children, which we understand as a "history of separations, differentiations, classifications, incessant cuts, exclusions by inclusions" (^{LOBO, 2019}, p. 212) and the notion of social risk within a neoliberal context in which the value of life is subject to questioning. A minimal deviation in childhood may represent a great risk for the social insertion of this subject in the adult life. In many cases, it is not exactly the child who resents the abnormality, but what is to come justifies the increasingly early need for intervention. If in the Classical Age children classified as abnormal were seen as "monstrosities to be segregated" (^{PAGNI, 2017}, p. 260), starting on the 19th century, it is begun to invest in their correction rather than segregation, according to the way positive technologies of power are configured (PAGNI, 2017), since childhood is currently constituted

[...] as a "filter to analyze behaviors" and, therefore, a supposed origin of all mental illnesses, deviations and abnormalities manifested in youth or adulthood. Those last wandering tendencies of life are the ones which must be treated and corrected since childhood, when diagnosed in family education and, particularly, by the school, before any kind of monstrosity manifests itself in adulthood and rebels with its emergence in the deformation of the population (^{PAGNI, 2017}, p. 260).

In the last 17 months we have lived the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil, "effects that materialize in multiple and different ways in each subject, depending on their unique ways of life" (^{MENEZES, 2021}, 59), and which significantly intensify the difficulties already experienced in the country due to the authoritarian and undemocratic ideals that support the actions of the current government, especially regarding to school inclusion (^{GALLO; OAK, 2020}). Pandemic and authoritarianism do not have a direct and determining relationship among themselves. A democratic government would not, just because it is democratic, capable of preventing a pandemic from happening, and in turn, the pandemic does not determine the construction of an authoritarian government. However, we understand that living the experience of the pandemic in a country based on an authoritarian government and extreme conservatism produces for many an intolerable, almost unliveable way of life.

We are facing difficult times, social insecurity caused by the setbacks produced by the adoption of policies that result in the loss of rights already guaranteed. These are times of precarious science, public education, inclusive school, working conditions, access to the public health system (^{PAGNI, 2020}; OAK, 2020). Times of naturalization of prejudiced discourses that proclaim hatred and the desire to annihilate difference, produced by those who assume without shame their racism, homophobia, misogyny, sexism, capacitism. Neoliberal times, of intensifying competition and productivism which individualize and weaken life in common; of prioritizing the market over life; times of death, of necropolitics (MBEBE, 2018), times of intensification of inequalities and the desire for norm.

In the face of life in these times, which herald the impending chaos, we invent a “new normal ”. Isolated in our homes, we try to restore routines, resume work, reorganize school practices. We take over the home office and remote education, we take care of ourselves through the intensification of professional and personal demands and start to live as if life was gradually returning to normality. It seems urgent to ask ourselves, “returning” to whom? "We cannot take the risk that to regain 'normality', any normality, the unacceptable is accepted." (^{BRUM, 2017}, s/p).

This unbridled race for the return to the already experienced, to the security which the known offers us, sometimes prevents us from looking at the uniqueness that constitutes us.

The school crisis will be aggravated if, with the present experiencing, the departments of education, the educational managers and teachers of all levels of education, including those responsible for teacher training, do not understand that our educational habits and ways of learning have been shaken and run over by the pandemic. (^{LOPES, 2021}, p. 33-34).

How to think about the effects of whats has been lived the pandemic in our lives? Only from the certainty that such effects are multiple, just as are multiple existences. Mothers, women, teachers, children at home, children in remote education, young children, adolescent children. Parents working domestically, on the health’s the front line, facing illnesses, exhaustion, emotional fragility. Children at home; children away from childhood; children victim of the adults’ illness. Teachers and families dealing with remote teaching, intensely exposed to screens, and insecurity in using them.

And the kids and the teenagers, how are they? Some excerpts from the experience in the psychological clinic can help us listen to those students in the midst of the pandemic, after a year of absence from school. It is interesting to realize that those are no speeches that happen at home, in the studies routine that has been installed for many children and young people who have exchanged the classroom for the living room, the bedroom or any room of the house in which they could perform their activities; it is, more precisely, a narrative that takes place in the spaces of psychological care to children and adolescents in suffering, who do not fail to verbalize the importance of the school place in their lives and the strangeness in occupying that space without the encounter, without touch, without the intense presence of affections, as it was old by a 17-year-old adolescent: "If you're not supposed to hug, I'm not even going to school"; or, a 10-year-old girl: "What is the fun in going and not being able to hug your classmates, have lunch at the table, not being able to whisper in one’s ear?" Aspects that seem banal to those who do not witness daily that space and do not live with the "school making" that pulsates only through encounters. The longing to learn in that space is so great that we hear phrases such as: "I want to go to class!" (girl, 15 years old); or "I'm itching for a test" (girl, 9 years old). And that make us grieve when they say: "I didn't learn anything this year" (girl, 13 years old), because we also seek to show that the pandemic and social distancing put us face to face with different aspects and dimensions of what would be learning (and teaching). Wouldn’t it be that they didn’t learn because we didn't teach? Wouldn't it be that we didn’t learn because we haven't been taught to understand possibilities in the midst of adversity? And one of the most poignant accounts that children teach us about school: a place to be remembered, to be told as a person who exists and whose existence is narrated there: "Will my colleagues forget me?" (girl, 6 years old). Once again, the school is the reason for narration, for necessity, for a space that tells and marks existence.

When considering what the selected narratives tell about being at home in remote teaching, it seems important to us to also ask ourselves what the narratives produced by the students will tell about the return to school, which took place recently throughout the country under different calendars and protocols. What intentions were announced by the schools for this return? What views were produced about this children who return and that is no longer the same? What to prioritize? What do you look at? How to start over and continue? Resume the path from where it has been left, or start over, reinventing ways of being in school which consider the longing felt and the isolation lived?

We believe that by highlighting these issues, we are announcing our concern about the possibility that the return will result in the intensification of unequal conditions of school access which are prior to the pandemic, after all, as the report presented in the epigraph, it is easy to notice our impulse in continuing the journey with those who can, and to find arguments to forgive ourselves in the face of confirmation that there are children “left behind." In this wake, we naturalize exclusions and in doing so we affirm that excluding is an acceptable practice: “And so, replicating this school model that leaves children behind, we follow learning that segregating is reasonable. What kind of society stands on these foundations?” (^{ROSA, 2020}, s/p).

As if the announcements of the excluding effects of what we are assuming as normal at the moment were no longer frightening, we have been asked about how many new students in the evaluation process, due to their non-learnings, will we have in the specialized services? How many new referrals to the offices, to the Specialized Educational Care (SEC), how many new processes in search of reports, diagnoses and classifications to justify a deficiency that is not of the student, but of society, will we see happen? How much search for the identification of the abnormality? How much desire for standardization?

To put it another way, what we emphasize here is the possibility that, in view of the return of children to school, by failing to care for the social context lived in the last two school years, which will be decisive in the behaviors and ways of relating to the learning presented by the students, let us intensify the process of life medicalization, especially of children, which has long been the focus of correction practices via school-made clinical referrals. As Hattge et al. claim:

[...] difficulties of learning, socialization, undisciplined behavior, among others so many “signs of deviation”, have been widely seen as pathologies that justify early referrals of children to the field of medicine in search of diagnoses that explain such ways of being in school. The production of a diagnosis would place these children as students for whom a series of prescriptions - produced from the establishment of a relationship network between clinical knowledge (via therapies and medicines) and pedagogical and educational knowledge - are viewed as capable of controlling, rehabilitating and, when it is not possible to normalize, bring students closer to acceptable normal gradients. (^{HATTGE et al., 2020}, p. 15).

It seems questionable to think that it is possible to ignore the fact that children returning to school were absent for more than one school year, even though, in privileged situations, contact was maintained via remote teaching. However, as we stated above, the practice of individually holding children responsible for problems that are collective has been invoked in the educational and family environment, when the singularities that present themselves, because they are unknown, prevent immediate action for their control and correction.

Subject to this individualization process that makes them responsible and justifies the search for diagnoses and classifications, we saw the children being targeted for practices that objectify them, and thus the child becomes the student; and the student becomes the sick; disabled; “different”; the student of inclusion; of special education; of the SEC. In this process, when we relate to human life by disregarding its dynamic, relational, changeable and unpredictable character, we turn it into a concrete object, subject to control, and dehumanize it. When, for example, rather than referring to a child by name, we say that it is “the autistic,” or “the wheelchair-user” “the deaf,” we clearly see this process of dehumanization. Common practice not only in schools, but in other spaces frequented by these children, it denotes the reduction of the subject to its diagnosis.

We have lived “these times” significantly affected in relation to the impacts of the pandemic on school practices, inclusive processes, and the intensification of the unequal conditions of existence historically socially produced, which allow some to maintain their privileges, to the detriment of the intensification of others vulnerability conditions. As teachers working in the educational field and who take up school as a space for human development and formation, we propose this text, from which we seek to discuss what the school can and what we can together propose from it in the construction of a less unequal society, more plural and inclusive.

By showing the power of the inclusive look on the relationships, we understand to be important to emphasize that we talk about inclusion by understanding it not as a specific action, aimed at some subjects, those who by their existence conditions end up receiving brands, names, classifications and/or diagnoses, but inclusion as a principle of life, which makes us aware of alterity, uniqueness, and the infinite possibilities that exist to put ourselves before life. Inclusion as listening to the other, another that is not the target of our desire for capture and normalization.

Inclusion, listening, attention to difference: for a school that reinvents itself in the post-pandemic

Inclusion, listening, attention to difference, sensitivity and openness to the one who comes, to the childhood that returns to school. These elements remind us of a very inspiring childhood story written in 1968 and which was resumed last year in the midst of the pandemic⁵. It is The tiger who came to tea, by German writer Judith ^{Kerr (2021}), who tells the story of a tiger that appeared in an afternoon to take part in the snack organized by a girl, Sofia, and her mother. Both found to be quite confusing and atypical the presence of the animal knocking on its door, but they did not hesitate to invite him to enter: “-Excuse me, but I'm very hungry. Can I have tea with you? Sofia's mom said: - Of course, you may come in” (^{KERR, 2021}, p. 04). Mother and daughter offered what they had: the tiger went to sit at the table, he was very well received in the house, they let him settle; and so welcomed was that he sought all the available food of the house, finishing off even the water on the taps: there would be neither a drop nor a crumb for the father. Who didn't care and went in search of an alternative to feed the family. He even warned them to buy “tiger food” for the next possible visit of the animal. However, he never came back. Perhaps other visits will come and they are will not prepared specifically for such: But would they not be prepared to receive those who come? The family showed that they knew how to receive, welcome and let the tiger at will - how would we be prepared for this, at this time when we live a school that no longer seems open to welcome, to offer attentive and open listening?

We remember a quote from Jorge Larrosa, in the book Profane Pedagogy, of which we articulate to the ideas here presented. For the Spanish teacher and researcher, education should be understood as an invitation to be responsibly accepted:

Education is how people, institutions, and societies respond to the arrival of those who are born. Education is the way in which the world receives those who are born, to respond is to open up to the questioning of a call and accept a responsibility. To receive is to create a place: to open a space in which the one who comes can dwell; to make oneself available to the one who comes, without intending to reduce one to the logic that prevails in our home (^{LARROSA, 2017}, p. 234-235, author's griffin).

It seems to us that, in the midst of a so-called “normal new”, some things have actually changed; but what cannot be achieved in this new modus operandi is our ability to “receive the one who comes”, our way of dealing with people, by willing to see the subject in the students who arrive to us, recognizing their - and our! - weaknesses. We will thus be open for the meeting, waiting:

[...] those who do not wait, definitely close the doors to the meeting, because this is only possible when one expects it, when there is an interior opening for the meeting. You only see what you expect, the one who continues to wait, despite all the difficulties you may encounter in the path of seeking and waiting (^{ROCHA, 2007}, p. 259).

The possibility of the inclusive school idea presupposes the desire for life in difference. We need to want to be with the other. We need to desire to learn by listening and living with this other. We need to question standards and norms. In other words, we need to "agree on a social and economic world in which it is radically unacceptable for some to have access" (^{BUTLER, 2020}) to school "while others are denied this access based on the fact that they do not have the conditions" of behaving, relating and learning.

Who defines these criteria? Who defines what behaviors are accepted, what relationships are possible, what learnings are learnings? Which students deserve to continue studying while others remain barred from their right to school even if they are regularly enrolled in school?

This education that goes ahead at any cost, in an inflexible, uniform, standardized way; which makes the content the focus of an action alienated to realities; which overloads teachers; which assumes as an ideal of student the ideal of productive subject; that's the usual education, now in virtual mode. (^{ROSA, 2020}, s/n).

Can we call it “school” a space that defends the one and takes the difference as an element that makes life impossible with the other? What do we mean by school? Proposing remote education without equal access conditions and rely on school practices that disregard the students singularities are not ways to legally guarantee exclusion? In doing so are we not announcing a way of life in which one does not want to be with another, one does not want inclusion and one does not support the difference?

Given the feeling that being “in this world” is no longer tolerable, we assume the need to be active in a process of rebuilding society in search of social equality. It is our political commitment to assume as a central demand of the post-pandemic the fight for an inclusive way of life, which presupposes the establishment of daily relations that call us to listen to oneself, to a self-examination in search of the identification and deconstruction of the desire for standardization and normalization of life (ours and others), thus establishing a relationship with the other centered on the ethics of attention to the singular of existence. Defending singularities and potentiating the multiplicity to the detriment of the one, of the norm, makes us believe in the power of the school as a space of multiple encounters. A school centered on multiplicity, because it is full of pulsating lives; therefore, a place of unheard-of, of unpredictable and of discoveries that expand existence and that presupposes willingness to listen to the other and a permanent desire to be surprised by what the meetings can bring.

“It is through listening that the new comes" (^{BRUM, 2017}, p. 35). In times of selfies and an accent on narratives of self, opening up space to listen to the other can be a great challenge: “Listening is understanding both what is said and what is not said. Listening is understanding that silence also speaks - or understanding that people keep saying when they stop talking” (BRUM, 2017, p. 35).

^{Arantes (2012}) reminds us that:

[...] listening has already been thought, in the ancient greek practices of self-care (epiméleia heautoú), as the first stage of ascesis (áskesis), which is what allows the subject to acquire and say the true discourse.[...] Just as it takes an art (tékhne) to speak, it takes an experience and a skill (empeiría and tribé) to listen. (^{ARANTES, 2012}, p. 93-94).

In the specific case of children that returns to school, listening tells us about paying attention to the subtleties: what is said and not said, the plays, the games, the crying, the laughter, the look in the distance during class waiting for the next task, what makes vibrate and lights the sparkle in the eye, the fears, the doubts, memories and forgetfulness. “Listening is a joy, it’s to let be affected by the noises and noisiness of the world” (^{ARANTES, 2012}, p. 93); by opening up space to listen, we expand the possibility for the manifestation of difference. And we also expand the possibility of understanding this manifestation, of looking beyond brands that try to define, categorize and serve as a parameter to normalize. Listening, in the end, would have to do with openness and appreciation of human complexity, “[...] not only what we expect, which reassures us or coincides with our senses, but also what diverges from our interpretations [...]” (BAJOUR, 2021, p. 24).

Opening space for listening to yourself and the other

When we look at the children that lives the school before the world beset by COVID-19, we are engaged in problematizing inclusion and exclusion practices already produced in a pre-pandemic context and that, under our conception, can and are being intensified by the moment lived, a moment that cannot be located as post-pandemic, but that already starts the process of resumption of face-to-face school practices throughout the country. Questions related to concern about the intentions of school and educational proposals for this return; which aspects have been prioritized in the resumption, and which actions are mobilized to ensure that everyone can have their singularities considered in the pedagogical proposals that are now operationalized, have permeated our actions as researchers in the areas of teaching and education, and resulted in the discussion developed here.

Faced with the limitations of remote teaching, which bars physical encounters, hugs, and the play that makes us learn together, we have seen a way of meaning that the school centered on content reproduction; in the absence of dialog - and therefore listening - have strengthened itself. The effects of what was experienced by children, in this period of more than one school year away from school, are reported to be significantly worrying, while unique to each of the returning children.

In the imminent possibility of silencing such singularities, we assume a political commitment to denounce the exclusionary effects that we will see to be effected if the possible difficulties presented by the children to be in school again, in an appropriate way to the established normative standards, are read in an non-contextualized way, based on individual accountability discourses of the students. Such discourses tend to result in the search for specialized referrals capable of producing classifications and diagnoses that justify the sickening of the student and its resulting subjection to medicalization.

Contrary to these ways of looking at children, school and the difference, we propose the defense of another school, which resists the imperative of the norm, and attentive to the singularity that constitutes every life that inhabits it. A school that bets on difference; on the unpredictable character of life; on listening and on the multiplicity of meetings. With this bet, and through listening (of oneself) we invite, at the end, to follow us from a few questions: What did you do to include today? How did you receive the tiger that came for afternoon tea? How did you welcome and look at the one who arrived? How did you prepare the space for someone to inhabit it? How do you keep waiting? Is there a bet in the school as a space of openness, reception, listening and sensitivity?