The “waiting”: educational guidelines for remote teaching in the period of social distancing

In line with Provisional Measure no. 934, of April 1, 2020, which establishes exceptional rules on the school year of Basic Education and Higher Education resulting from the measures to face the emergency of public health, the researched Municipal Education Network forwarded, on April 17, 2020, educational guidelines for all school units through an Official letter, which should and are still being developed as a complement to learning. Such activities have been made available through virtual environments (Moodle or ClassRoom) or through printed material, with priority to the first to avoid people going to school. According to the document, school units may or may not join the development of remote activities and these will not be used as a substitute for in-person classes or to account for the school year.

Of the total of 178 school units belonging to the researched Municipal Network, initially nine did not adhere to remote activities; of these, five revised their position and, in the end, only four did not develop them. In October 2020, through the Ordinance issued by the Municipal Education Department of the researched education network, among other guidelines, the Municipal Education Department, considering the indications of the National Education Council, which dispensed the mandatory minimum number of school days provided that the minimum annual workload of 800 hours for Elementary School, indicated the use of activities carried out remotely. The validation of the workload will be the responsibility of the management team of the school units. This shows that the lack of federal guidelines or the late indication (almost at the end of the school year) about the procedures to be adopted by the education systems had a negative impact on the adoption of educational measures in the period of social distancing. What we experience, in Brazil, is that each State and Municipality organized its educational actions considering its reality and local political disputes.

In the educational field, we did not have a direction from the Federal Executive Branch. The sparse amount of manifestations came from the National Education Council, with no emergency plan on the part of the Ministry of Education, which gave prominence to the local managers, at the same time it opened and aggravated inequalities between the federal entities. Thus, at first, as we highlighted in the title of this paper, “waiting” was one of the marks of many school systems. The late response in the organization of educational processes differed a lot from what happened in some developed countries, such as the “Manifesto of the School that does not stop” (^{Raniere, Gagiollo & Borges, 2020}, p. 4), in Italy, which stresses the important role of the school in welcoming and supporting the school community in this very unique time.

In relation to students with disabilities, practical activities of daily living were proposed, according to the document with the objective to maintain the school bond and the study routine, favoring their emotional, temporal and spatial organization, always according to the possibilities of family organization (^{Raniere, Gagiollo & Borges, 2020}, p. 5). The document prepared by the Special Education Coordination team, linked to the Special Education Department, focused, in addition to the activities of daily living, on suggestions for teachers on the application of the functional curriculum and suggested models of alternative communication boards. The document also provides a set of guidelines and information for parents/guardians to develop activities at home.

The possible curriculum to be developed for these children involves the conditions of access to the internet and technological resources of children and Education professionals. ^{Morgado, Souza and Pacheco (2020}) draw attention to the risk we take in remote activities by focusing on a purely instrumental curriculum perspective. They also call attention to the concepts of curriculum isolation and digitalization of the curriculum, which contribute to weakening the interactive, social and personal dimensions of experiencing the school curriculum. In this sense, focusing on a functional remote curriculum with activities of daily living for Special Education students ends up excluding them from what ^{Young (2010}) calls “powerful knowledge”.

In this regard, children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome, as well as other children with disabilities who demand more systematic interventions and mediations to appropriate school concepts, certainly with social distancing, were the most affected in regards to curricular access, since the teaching and learning processes are a social practice that occurs in interaction mediated by the other (^{Mendes & Silva, 2014}; ^{Pletsch, Mendes, & Hostins, 2015}; Pletsch, 2015; ^{Rocha, 2014}, 2018; ^{Souza & Dainez, 2020}). In addition, ^{Dussel (2020}), in pointing out the impacts of the domiciliation of what we call “school”, that is, of the more specific characteristics of the school, highlights how the classroom environment managed to more effectively appease many of the inequalities of origin. Remote emergency teaching has brought social and economic inequalities into force in the school process, showing that such inequalities demarcate very strongly the conditions of technological access and the proposed online educational processes.

It is worth remembering that the National Education Guidelines and Framework Law - Law no. 9,394, of December 20, 1996, does not provide online education for Early Childhood Education, even in exceptional cases, as discussed by ^{Coutinho and Côco (2020}). The authors also presented a set of mobilizations that occur, above all, at the beginning of the pandemic against remote education at this educational level, considering, in their opinion, that it does not fully guarantee the Right to Education and the care of children. However, after 8 months of closure of school institutions (still no date to return in person in almost all education networks in Brazil), we ask ourselves: What possibilities can and have been developed through online remote education in Early Childhood Education, considering the lack of epidemiological security caused by COVID-19? Especially in the case of children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome and other disabilities, how do we equate “waiting” with the “urgency” of stimulating their development?

Next, we will present how the professionals understood and developed this process in Early Childhood Education with children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome and their families.

The “urgency”: remote activities developed with children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome

The Municipal Education Network, a participant in the research, has 22 children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome enrolled in Early Childhood Education. According to the Special Education manager, it was very difficult to develop more systematic actions for these children, even with a guiding document, considering that many teachers did not even have contact with the children who had just been enrolled when we started social distancing. In their own words:

Our document does not have a content character. The concern was to establish links with students and their families, guiding them through this new reality, because everything happened at the very beginning of the year. Many teachers had not even had contact with students who had new enrollments, as was the case with most children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome. Therefore, it was not possible to develop an individual personalized plan. Our guidance was focused on day-to-day practices. Many of our students were left without their therapeutic treatments, because assistance was also suspended. So we were very worried because without the assistance, they would be without medication, which, for most, is necessary, as children have seizures. (Special Education Manager, in an interview, October 29, 2020).

One of the aspects that draws attention in the interview concerns the cancellation of clinical appointments, which, for children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome, are essential, since a significant portion, especially those with microcephaly make use of controlled medications and present epileptic conditions and other symptoms that demand healthcare intervention. There is a need for intersectoral actions and policies, with a special focus on education, health and social assistance, in the comprehensive care of children, especially for those with chronic diseases associated with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome (Sá et al., 2019a; Sá, Thomazinho, Ribeiro, & Molleri, 2019b).

Regarding the contents and knowledge worked in partnership with the family, the manager’s assessment is that the children were harmed despite the efforts of teachers and their families:

I believe that there was a great effort by the families to handle this process in partnership with the families. We talked a lot about this, this responsibility of the family, now, for the pedagogical part, inevitably happened in all families in Brazil and the world, I believe. We had many families engaged in this process, we receive videos from children, starting to study. So, you know, I think there was a very large involvement of the family, but, in terms of content, I think there was no appropriation of new school knowledge. (Special Education Manager, in an interview, October 29, 2020).

With regard to remote work with one of the children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome, 4 years old, Teacher Flora also reported the difficulties faced, but, unlike the manager, she signaled small advances in learning and in the development of her student. In an excerpt from her interview, she stated:

At first, it was very difficult, because the contact I had with the mother changed, but, as soon as I got the phone number in late April, I called and we started the communication. We established a WhatsApp video call per week. It was not simple considering that she does not have motor problems or trunk support like most children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome in the network, but she has speech delay and very agitated with little concentration for online meetings. So, in partnership with the mother, we organized a strategy so that she could focus on the moments when we were doing these virtual meetings. As she had no teaching materials and resources at home, I went to school and organized an envelope with materials for the mother to get (notebook, crayons, pencils and other materials). With the material, I was able to carry out more systematic activities with her. I worked on more playful as well as other content from Early Childhood Education such as colors, recognition of body parts. She made the drawings and showed me. The mother told me that she was also very agitated because there was no clinical care due to the pandemic. But I realized that our meetings, even if only virtual, were important, she is now speaking, she’s more at ease and participative. (Teacher Flora, in an interview, October 29, 2020).

As we can infer from Teacher Flora’s statement, the activities initially focused on communication, an important aspect to develop language and structure the child’s thinking as foreseen in the 2012 Curricular Proposals for Early Childhood Education of the Network. According to the document,

from an early age children are engaged in a communication process in which they are encouraged to develop procedures that allow them to question the world and appropriate it. They gradually assimilate the rules of action and communication that emerge around them, putting them into practice in their activities and their speeches. (Curricular Proposals for Early Childhood Education in the researched school network, 2012, p. 28).

In this regard, we signal that pedagogical resources are fundamental. In another research with children with multiple disabilities that had speech delay, it was found that pedagogical and alternative communication resources, for example, contribute as instruments that favor student interaction and communication and, thus, enable new ways to reorganize the language that is fundamental to their learning of school knowledge (^{Rocha & Pletsch, 2018}). This, in the historical-cultural perspective of Vygotsky (1997, 2001), favors the appropriation of the symbolic system necessary to structure language and thinking.

In Teacher Flora’s statement, it is also evident that, from the most systematized activities, the child developed some knowledge on how to differentiate colors and parts of the human body. However, this does not guarantee the full development of the child, and the teachers are aware of this, as well as the Special Education manager and the Pedagogical Coordinator, who participated in the interviews and stressed the importance of maintaining interlocutions and the bond with the children and their families. All interviews showed persistence and collective resilience, as discussed by Ebersohn (2020) about the global challenge posed by COVID-19 to think about the direction of a sustainable equitable education. Still, regarding the persistence of teachers and educational teams in maintaining contact with the families of their students, it is worth mentioning that the National Curricular Guidelines for Early Childhood Education 2009 - Resolution no. 5, of December 17, 2009 - already signaled the importance of the dialogue with families in Early Childhood Education. This aspect is also reinforced by ^{Coutinho and Côco (2020}) who advocate that the inadequacy of the Distance Education proposal in Early Childhood Education does not mean affirming the interruption of relationships, and demands careful planning and attending to the education and care of children, families and professionals (p. 7).

Another aspect that draws attention is the social condition of families that do not have access to basic school materials, which reinforces our argument that thinking about remote education activities for these children requires understanding the social inequalities in which they and their families are inserted (internet access, didactic-pedagogical resources, even access to technological resources such as tablets or computers). Recent research has shown that around 30% of the national population still do not have internet (^{Oliveira, 2020}), and about 90% of students between 9 and 17 years old have access only through a cell phone (Regional Center for Studies for the Development of the Information Society [Centro Regional de Estudos para o Desenvolvimento da Sociedade da Informação - CETIC], 2019).

Teacher Narciso said that, despite the fact that the municipality is part of the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro, many places do not have access to the internet and, therefore, she calls these families. Teacher Flora, in turn, externalized, in her speech, the importance of public policies to expand access to the internet and technological resources to reduce inequalities between public and private education:

There should be legislation, a public policy, that would oblige, during this pandemic period, that operators open the signal, so that people could communicate, interact and do school activities. Thus, thinking about education as a whole, how much of these effects would be mitigated, how many more people would have benefited from remote education. The lack of access widens the inequalities between those in public education and those in private education. It is evident that those who have their children in private schools had some type of education in that period and most of those who do not, who work for public schools or have their children enrolled in public schools, did not have the same type of education. (Teacher Flora, in an interview, October 29, 2020).

Still, on the work carried out by remote means, Teacher Narciso reported that, despite maintaining contact with the mother, she was unable to carry out activities with her 4-year-old student Ana Clara (fictitious name), who still could not walk properly due to the Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome. To illustrate this, we selected the following excerpt:

The partnership with the mother was very easy last year, but this year, she got pregnant with her fourth child and was unable to give so much attention to Ana who is the third child and has Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome. When the proposal for remote classes came up, I talked to her and she said to me: “Teacher, I can’t do it at home, if it was at the daycare center I would take her there, you know that I do not measure efforts to take Ana who is not walking properly yet. But, at home it doesn’t work, first I have a very complicated pregnancy, my six-year-old son is a very naughty child and I still have Ana. So, for me to do activities with her at home, it is difficult” . Our daycare center adopted it as a way to keep in touch with children and do activities on Facebook with informative videos, but no content. Most of them are indications of games. For example: Who jumps higher, these kinds of things, even to work more with the contact. Activities got more difficult, but I keep in touch. The mother sends me pictures of what Ana is doing, but pedagogical activities have not been carried out. (Teacher Narciso, in an interview, October 29, 2020).

The statement shows that the teacher maintains contact with Ana’s mother and that the mother has difficulties in carrying out activities with her daughter due to her family context. Scientific literature has shown that the birth of a child with a disability, whether intellectual or multiple, due to the implications of Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome, impacts on family routine and dynamics (^{Menezes, Alves, Gomes, & Pereira, 2019}). According to the authors, significant changes occur in “family and social relationships with negative repercussions on the physical and psychological health of individuals” (Menezes et al., 2019, p. 40) and that mothers are overburdened with regard to the care demanded by the child with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome. Staying at school would have reduced this burden on the mother, as evidenced by ^{Garcia’s research (2020}) when talking about the importance of school in promoting the educational development of these children and the possibility of mothers having time to take care of themselves.

^{Garcia (2020}) also illustrated the difficulties and lack of preparation of the school institution and government agencies in receiving a child with so many specificities in a regular class of Early Childhood Education, even with special food for the use of a gastric tube, used by several children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome. Despite these challenges, Garcia’s research also showed the potential for joint work between the school and the child’s mother, who produced a short video to show the school staff how to take care of their daughter’s particularities. The potential of the family and its partnership with the school was also evidenced in the study conducted by ^{Souza and Dainez (2020}) when they portrayed the remote education promoted for a child with autism named José. The authors show the structure set up by José’s parents so that he could feel at school even though he would be at home doing remote activities.

The role of the mother was also signaled by Teacher Flora when describing the remote activities carried out with her student Ana:

The mother’s role was fundamental and essential. She was always available so that I could make these calls with her daughter in the online format. This mother was always very dedicated and was a good partner, and in the pandemic it was no different. I created a group with all the parents. Some parents signaled to me what they were looking for individually and wanted suggestions for material to work with their children at home. I was responsible specifically for meeting the needs and requests of parents. Some wanted pedagogical and literacy suggestions. They asked for books with letters to cover, with numbers. They wanted to do activities with their children at home, but they had no information about the best material. (Teacher Flora, in an interview, October 29, 2020).

As we can see throughout this article, the social realities of families, particularly mothers, to carry out activities in partnership with teachers are very different from each other. In this sense, one of the concerns present in the statements of the teachers, who in Early Childhood Education are women, was to think about the return and how to minimize the loss caused by the pandemic in terms of access to school knowledge. The statement of the teacher and also a Pedagogical Advisor at a daycare center systematizes this concern:

We will have to work hard when we return to in-person work, so that we can try to overcome this loss. We developed work through Facebook or WhatsApp, but most had access only through cell phones. Performing an activity on a computer screen is very different for the child to see and interact with the teacher, than that of a small cell phone screen. I know because I see my daughter here at home, when she does school activities, an activity being synchronous or asynchronous, when sent on the computer screen, her attention is different. Then, go figure a child with a disability, with a difficulty of abstraction, a child who has already lost in-person contact, has already lost this interaction and has yet to watch it on the small screen of the phone. I think of the children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome who often have visual loss, have considerable visual impairment and have to watch on that small cell phone screen. Besides that, in addition to partnerships and public policies, our network should have already invested, not only now. We were taken by surprise by this pandemic, but let there be a lesson, since this hybrid education may have to be established, that we need to have a policy, not only of internet, but also of distribution of equipment so that these families can be able to carry out activities with their children. Of course, we know that, even if it guarantees all this, it will not necessarily have great results. It depends on the family routine, on the structure, on many things that we already struggled with as a barrier to classroom teaching. Go figure now that we are not having this work on a daily basis and day-by-day with the child. But I think it would be a first step. Regarding the work we did with Ana Flor (fictitious name) with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome during remote teaching, I can systematize that the main focus was to maintain the link with her. I know that development can happen in any space, but we, as a school, are a privileged space for it to occur based on intervention and pedagogical mediation. So, when we return to in-person work in Early Childhood Education, we will have to think about how to act to fill this gap that was lost in 2020. (Pedagogical Advisor, in an interview, October 29, 2020).

Precariousness, losses, urgencies, inequalities. The 2020 mark in the school processes of children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome is the same as that of different children in Brazil with or without disabilities. Perhaps in a very painful way, the reality pointed out by different international research with respect to intersectionality is the biggest lesson to be learned: the educational process is “infected” (to speak of a virus-wise pedagogy) by different aspects of children’s identity, their families and their teachers. ^{Artiles (2013}, 2019) and Artiles, Dorn and Bal (2016) have shown in their research agenda how intersectionality needs to be understood in the processes of educational inclusion. It is this articulation that will make possible progress on issues of equity in education.

In the case discussed in this paper, the urgency demanded by the epidemic was forced to live with the “waiting” produced by the pandemic. In this difficult equation, past social and structural inequalities in Brazilian society had a major impact on the possible curriculum constructed by the teachers. In this context, the results show us some historical difficulties.

The first concerns non-existent or precarious intersectoral responses. The disarticulation between health and education, pointed out by the cancellation of assistance for children, shows us the urgency to overcome these difficulties and establish collective works of intersectoral teams that involve social assistance, health and education. In pandemic times, this path will be increasingly necessary. The second refers to the confrontation of gender inequalities verified in the situation of mothers of children with Congenital Zika Virus Syndrome. The pandemic, in fact, aggravated the patriarchal mark of Brazilian society, whose overcoming demands, among other actions, public policies aimed at this part of the population. Finally, the third refers to the technological inequalities that arise and are linked to other pre-existing inequalities, such as housing, food, security, etc.

Considering this reality, the possible pedagogical alternatives are not very efficient. In an emergency situation, waiting can be fatal. In this sense, as we move towards a world in which epidemics will exist within pandemics⁷, our educational responses will have to have another dimension and seek other alternatives, including considering the necessary resilience. Among the urgencies, studies like this show us that our research needs, among other aspects, to create intersectoral and intersectional dialogues, so that we can together think about the possible and necessary school. The defense of science, life and a truly inclusive education, which recognizes cognitive and cultural plurality as a value, requires an agenda in defense of public education for all.