Since 2019, the world has experienced uncertainty in all social fields, following the announcement by the World Health Organization (WHO) of a strain of SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, identified in the city of Wuhan, province of Hubei, China. Since then, covid-19 has occupied the agenda of debates of government leaders, scientists, universities and world organizations, specifically on the impacts of the pandemic on the preservation of life, economy and jobs in a scenario of recomposition of the growth rates of countries, high oil prices, migrations and discussions on climate, environment and clean energy.

Faced with the perplexity and fear of the spread of covid-19, governments, sanitary doctors, infectologists and management authorities recommended adopting measures restricting the movement of people, closing borders between countries, implementing remote work, cancelling cultural and artistic activities, providing social isolation that led to the interruption of various social activities. Education was one of the affected areas, raising the discussion about the attributions and functions of the State to guarantee and provide social rights, especially educational rights, during crises such as the pandemics. In this field, social and digital inequalities were evidenced in the guarantee of access to technologies that would enable teaching-learning for thousands of children and adolescents.

At the same time, on the prowl, the giant big techs: Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsolft (GAFAM), financiers and entrepreneurs of education and teaching in the pandemic context encouraged national governments to adopt measures for the production, circulation and consumption of goods, equipment, platforms and services, since education and teaching have been elevated and inserted into private and competitive business aiming for profit. In this context, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in the document A framework to guide an education response to the COVID-19 Pandemic of 2020 (OECD, ²⁰²⁰) indicates abstract formulas, devoid of local history, to mitigate the weaknesses in the learning of students whose school activities have been suspended around the world.

In the search for alternatives, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the Centre for Studies and Research in Education and Community Action (CENPEC), in the document Scenarios of school exclusion in Brazil (UNICEF, ²⁰²¹), discuss the worsening situation of Brazilian children and adolescents without access to digital technologies, whose right to education has been infringed. At the same time, education networks and schools across the country are seeking alternatives to ensure the constitutional principle prescribed in Article 205 of the Brazilian Constitution:

Education, which is the right of all and duty of the State and of the family, shall be promoted and fostered with the cooperation of society, with a view to the full development of the person, his preparation for the exercise of citizenship and his qualification for work. (Brasil, ¹⁹⁸⁸, s.p.)

Article 208 also states that:

The duty of the State towards education shall be fulfilled by ensuring the following: I – mandatory basic education, free of charge, for every individual from the age of 4 (four) through the age of 17 (seventeen), including the assurance of its free offer to all those who did not have access to it at the proper age (Brasil, ¹⁹⁸⁸, s.p.)

Even though the right to education is prescribed by law, the 2019 Basic Education Census (Educacenso) recorded 47.9 million enrolments in the 180,600 basic education schools in Brazil and the difficulties of access to the internet in public elementary schools with low coverage in the states of Acre, Amazonas, Maranhão and Pará (Instituto Nacional de Estudos e Pesquisas Educacionais Anísio Teixeira [Inep], ²⁰²⁰, s.p.). This revealed the abysmal Brazilian economic and social inequality concentrated in regions historically excluded from State actions. Such regions need to have the quality of life of their population and access to basic services such as health and education improved. The data also revealed that almost 1.1 million children and adolescents of compulsory school age were out of school in 2019, one year before the pandemic. Most of them were aged 4 and 5 years (pre-school) and 15 to 17 years (high school).

This reality has become more complex with the pandemic. In November 2020, the first year covid-19 was recorded, it was identified that at the end of the school year, 5,075,294 children and adolescents aged 6 to 17 years were out of school or without access to school activities. This number corresponds to 13.9% of this population that declared not attending school or attending school but not having school activities (UNICEF, ²⁰²¹).

On 17 March 2020, the Ministry of Education, through the National Education Council, published Ordinance Nr. 343, which provides for the replacement of face-to-face classes by digital media classes for the duration of the covid-19 pandemic situation. The articles related to basic education are as follows:

Art. 1 To authorise, on an exceptional basis, the substitution of face-to-face subjects, in progress, by classes using information and communication means and technologies, within the limits established by the legislation in force. […]

§ 2. Institutions shall be responsible for defining the subjects that may be substituted, making available tools for students to enable them to monitor the content offered and to carry out assessments during the period of authorisation referred to in the caput.

Art. 2, § 1 Suspended academic activities must be fully reinstated in order to comply with the teaching days and class hours established in current legislation.

§ Institutions may also amend the holiday calendar, provided they comply with the teaching days and class hours established in current legislation. (Brasil, ^2020a, s.p.)

Therefore, the Ministry of Education, through the National Education Council (Opinion Nr. 5/2020) provided for the reorganization of the school calendar and the possibility of considering non-contact activities for purposes of compliance with the minimum annual workload, due to the covid-19 pandemic, prescribing that:

[…] non-face-to-face pedagogical activities may occur through digital media (video classes, content organized in virtual platforms for teaching and learning, social networks, e-mail, blogs, among others); through television or radio programs; by adopting printed teaching materials with pedagogical guidelines distributed to students and their parents or guardians; and by guiding readings, projects, research, activities and exercises indicated in the teaching materials. (Brasil, ^2020b, p. 11)

With the legal prerogatives, Education and Technology sectors entrepreneurs and big techs executives approached education secretaries, university deans and school headmasters and presented digital technologies, softwares, platforms and programs for resuming online educational services. On one side were the giants of information technology companies eager for expansion and potential consumers of digital technologies, equipment and services, and on the other, the vivid memory of the struggles of social movements and academic and scientific associations that saw the provisions of the ¹⁹⁸⁸ Federal Constitution languish. The secretaries and managers of education, each at their own level, signed contracts, bought packages and adhered to platforms and services marketed by business corporations. The race for the purchase of information and communication technologies, broadband internet services, tablets, softwares, mobile phones, phone lines, notebooks, microcomputers, iphones spread to all sectors. They also opened the markets of the productive chain – production, circulation and consumption of technological objects. However, they did not attend private and public schools equally, excluding children, teenagers and young people from access to school education. A significant part of the population, of about 38 million Brazilians, are in vulnerable conditions and remain excluded from access to digital technologies.

In this Institut of inequality, social networks have expanded the forms of communication, information and interactivity between people, companies, corporations and educational institutions. The advance of the internet, the development of digital technologies and the emergence of interactive networks have enabled access to knowledge and information, as well as to other ways of building scientific and technological knowledge, communicating, connecting and maintaining social, work and study relationships.

We advocate, therefore, for the knowledge and use of technologies as a result of human work. These are means, instruments, tools which enable multiple languages, circulation and dissemination of codes, methods, graphics, knowledge, discoveries, expansion of forms of connection, interaction, articulation, communication and information. Technologies are human creations and can favour human life, they are transmission vehicles, which carry things, objects, products, artifacts, but also, ideologies, values, methods, conceptions, integrated and interconnected systems and artificial intelligence.

In view of this reality – and based on research of scientific publications on the Spanish flu that hit the world at the beginning of the 20th century – the absence of studies and research dealing with the provision of education, school work, management and teaching practices during that pandemic was identified.

The dossier Educational management and pedagogical work in the pandemic context is the result of the commitment of teacher-researchers from Brazil, Spain and Portugal in the scientific, historical and memory-building production of one of the most traumatic episodes in the history of world health. It brings different points of view on several educational realities with interests in distinct fields which complement each other in the dialogue between the articulators around themes such as: school and teaching, learning processes and evaluation; the initial and continuous training of teachers and the development of critical consciousness during the pandemic; the teaching protagonism in the adoption of pedagogical practices to include students using existing technologies and active methodologies and self-regulation of learning; the organization of the offer of practical activities in remote emergency format in undergraduate courses as the internship (a challenge faced by universities); the neotechnological management of education.

These articles are the result of scientific-academic research developed by research groups. They express different theoretical-epistemological conceptions, multiple interpretations of education in the pandemic, and are now part of the set of productions of Linhas Críticas Journal of the Faculty of Education of the University of Brasilia - Brazil. As a scientific and historical record, they contemplate the institutional, regional and international diversity that contributes to the production of knowledge about educational management and pedagogical work in the covid-19 pandemic.