Methodological path

In 2020, 84 original images were produced by 25 teachers themselves, during a training course, responding to the request that they should bring 3 to 5 original photos to the meeting that portrayed their work during the pandemic. Valuing the participative methodology, the teachers taking part in the training research were invited to create and recreate knowledge about the conditions of their work, the mental health of everyone involved in the educational process, the consequences of social distancing on student learning, inequalities and vulnerabilities that created precarious conditions to students and teachers.

The images selected for discussion presented below were initially sorted by themes, and the notes of the assistant researchers who conducted the training, as well as the audiovisual recordings that were in the collection, accompanying the images, were accessed to understand the significations constructed through the teacher/research assistant dialogues.

the term “signification” is used in order to express the dialectical articulation between senses and meanings, revealing that individual and society, thought and language, affect and cognition constitute relationships that make up as a unity (^{AGUIAR; ARANHA; SOARES, 2021}, p. 3).

Having conducted the survey of pre-indicators and thematic indicators, progress was made towards the constitution of two nuclei of meaning which will be presented below. The nuclei of meaning are understood as the most advanced synthesis of the analytical process; in this way, they go beyond the articulation between similarity, complementarity, contraposition constructed through indicators, but especially give rise to “the possibility for the researcher to reveal any contradiction present between objectified significations” (^{AGUIAR; ARANHA; SOARES, 2021}, p. 9) and, thus, produce explanations and not just the description of phenomena.

“I belong to the school and the school belongs to me”

The photographs, in a teacher training work, with the perspective that considers the subjectivity/objectivity relationship in a dialectical way, are understood as sociocultural constructions pregnant with significations. The narratives woven into the image expand in dialogue with the interlocutor(s). Each narrative produces questions, reflections, silences, “revealing elements constructed from insertions in a historically situated reality; as a result". (^{FERREIRA DE FARIA; CAMARGO, 2023}, p. 257). In this way, “each person reads the senses expressed in the photos according to their unique experience, socially constituted in a vast field of possibilities” (^{MATTOS; ZANELLA; NUENBERG, 2014}).

The image presented in figure 1raised questions about being a mother, teacher, housewife and playing all these roles simultaneously. The burden that working women already had was intensified during social distancing; thus, the tension and overlap between the field of work and private life was evident in the discussions that took place in the proposed activity. In 2020, a time of social distancing, many teachers' homes became their classroom, their field of work and, at the same time, their field of home life - these fields, consequently, became blurred, often occupying the same space and the same temporality. Fialho and Neves (2022) point out that education teachers faced increased bureaucratic demands without adequate compensation for pedagogical support and access to digital technologies. ^{Magalhães (2021}) adds:

Your workforce for sale in the education market transforms your own life into your working time. Your future prospects, your energy, your freedom are invested there. The feeling of vulnerability [...], the feeling of not knowing what to do in the face of something for which they believe they are not prepared, generates anxiety in the face of the demand, contributing to this discomfort (p. 394).

This situation reveals how much social contradictions affect individuals, creating situations of suffering and tension. According to Harvey, individuals often don't even realize it - perhaps due to their alienated experience - but "there are conflicting demands between organized production - in the capitalist mode of production - and the reproduction needs of everyday life" (2016, p. 16). They are conflicting opposing desires and needs. Teachers who want to carry out their work, but suffer and become discouraged because they see themselves as inefficient and exhausted, and blame themselves, exempting the social aspect as an essential constituent element.

Source: Performa Collection (2020)

Figure 1 Image of the teacher’s classroom/living room 

The photo presented in figure 2, in the his own words, managed to capture all the “mess” that the teacher's life was going though during the pandemic. He says that students can only see what is inside the camera frame, without seeing what is around, all the teacher preparation for classes, all the materials. Talking about working conditions and anxiety regarding the accumulation of duties should not just be a form of venting. According to ^{Mattos, Zanella and Nuernberg (2014}, p. 904),

photographing is a process of creation and (trans)formation of reality, as, simultaneously and inseparably, the subject selects and (re)elaborates slices of reality (KOSSOY, 2007), converting them into products of their imagination and objectifying them in the photographic image.

Bringing the objectified image capture into dialogue is one of the ways of inserting the narrated scene in its entirety, considering the historicity that supports certain social practices, and the determinants of the situation in focus.

Source: Performa Collection (2020)

Figure 2 Image of the teacher’s work/dining table 

As evidenced in a dialogue with the teacher about the image presented in figure 2, in the research by Cipriani, Moreira and Carius (2021), the lack of adequate equipment and environments for classes, the need to produce videos and materials, and the exposure of personal image and the home environment were highlighted as aspects that negatively interfered with teachers' work during the pandemic.

Source: Performa Collection (2020)

Figure 3 Image of the teacher’s work desk at home 

At another point, the teacher's inventiveness is highlighted by the teacher who selects the image shown in figure 3. In dialogue with the researcher-trainer, she highlights that every day she looks for some new activity, analyzes materials and researches new possibilities for playful activities. She is emphatic in saying that this is not the right time to apply tests, because from her perspective, tests do not measure students' knowledge. The teacher already had reservations regarding the way tests were administered as a mere measurement of knowledge, prior to the pandemic. However, her criticism becomes more scathing with the pandemic, as it highlights how inefficient and exhausting this evaluation method can become in extreme times. When seeking a connection with students, the teacher watches the news every day to include the news in her classes. She prepares classes on slides with content mainly made up of images, as she realizes that students can learn more quickly. What is consolidated in these narratives is what ^{Freire (2013}) points out as wishing the student well, a relationship of affection that makes up teaching

This openness to wishing good does not actually mean that, as a teacher, I force myself to wish good to all students in the same way. It means, in fact, that [...] I need to discard as false the radical separation between earnestness and affectivity in teaching. It is not certain, especially from a democratic point of view, that I will be a better teacher the more severe, colder, more distant and "grey" I am in my relationships with students, in dealing with the knowable objects that I must teach (^{FREIRE, 2013}, p. 138).

The images shared by the teachers show what was hidden from many parents, educational administrators, and office managers. This movement is in line with what Vygotsky states when he discusses the importance of setting appearance aside, that is: we need to discover the “other side of the Moon” (^{VIGOTSKI, 2001}, p. 9). When invited to share their daily lives, what we see are professionals committed to their work at the same time as tired, performing various functions so that life remains minimally acceptable and healthy⁵. These are feelings, situations that oppose each other, but not in a dichotomous manner, as one does not exist without the other - they mutually constitute each other. Fatigue is permeated by commitment and vice versa. They make up a unity of opposites that, without a doubt, marks the teachers’ contradictory ways of being, thinking and feeling. In this way, photography emerges as a tool,

necessarily an expression of what one wants (or is able) to portray, marked by the gaze of those who produce it, by the angle, whether intentionally chosen or not, by the lights and colors that transform on the journey between the event and the objectification of its recording (ZANELLA, 2020, p. 109).

“Perhaps now parents and politicians will value teachers”

Understanding oneself as a subject of history and not as its object (^{FREIRE, 2013}) is one of the possibilities that teacher training within a critical perspective can enable. Being a subject of history is essential in the Freirean tradition. This is evident in the writings of Ana Maria Araújo Freire, when returning to the idea that critical consciousness is constituted in facing limit situations, a moment in which the historical, active and critical subject understands the urgency of the notion of the viable unprecedented” “as a moment of overcoming, at least in part, the oppressive aspects perceived in reality” (FREIRE, 2014, p. 41), something that will be achieved in the movement of liberating praxis, but we have already foreseen it from the concreteness of our possible dreams, from the perspective of materialization of what is historically viable. Thus, when dialoguing during training with the image presented in figure 4as an articulator of his speech, the teacher brought to reflection the devaluation of teaching work by society. At this meeting, he reported that the number of students who had difficulty carrying out activities at home and who came to school to use laptops had increased. At first, there were three students per shift; subsequently, up to five students per shift. There were two shifts, one in the morning, from 7:30 am to 11:00 am, the other, in the afternoon, from 1:15 pm to 4:00 pm. He said that contact with several families was difficult, requiring home visits to understand the breakdown in communication with the school. In some cases it was necessary to contact the Guardianship Council and Public. Prosecutor's Office.

When talking to the researcher, he reports that he is exhausted. But he insists that he remains “strong because he loves his job”. He does not act in his role as coordinator, as there is a need to be a teacher for the students at this time.

Source: Performa Collection (2020)

Figure 4 Image of work at school 

The dialogue builds possibilities for Paulo to think about working conditions during the pandemic, because at the same time that he works at a school that made computers and space available to students who had no access to digital technologies, it placed him in a diversion of functions, leading him to exhaustion. In the dialogical construction, he begins to realize that his action is resistance, and that the devaluation of teachers implies a contradictory relationship of affection with teaching, as he says he loves what he does, but does not want his daughter to follow the same path.

Teaching inventiveness is present through the commitment of teachers to those whose lives were made more precarious by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Source: Performa Collection (2020)

Figure 5 Image of students’ materials for correction at the teacher’s house. 

The teacher's report on the image shown in figure 5says that “these were corrected assignments of the week of students who did not have access to remote activities and needed to go to school to collect these worksheets, returning them a few days later for my correction and feedback”.

Through dialogue with the assistant researcher, he relates social inequality, precarious access to physical resources and, therefore, at that historical moment, to the (im)possibility of learning. In this way, the image leads to a signification of teaching work in which the teacher understands that the ecological, social and economic surroundings of the student have to be considered in pedagogical proposals committed to the democratic transformation of the school and access to knowledge (^{FREIRE, 2013}).

According to Ferreira de Faria and Camargo (2023, p. 251),

The production of photographic images involves the photographer's decision-making, producing a slice of reality that expresses his way of understanding it and appropriating it at that moment; however, it also involves the elements of the spectator, who will be able to (or not) grasp these elements of form based on their own reading of reality, guided by the cultural elements that constitute them throughout their lives.

The proposal for work in teacher training through photography and dialogic process goes beyond the production of photography, on the one hand (the person who takes the photo), and on the other hand the apprehension of it, (the person who sees the photo). In the dialogue, the image acquires new significations - its thematization then enables transformations that are not seen as antecedents to the encounter, but are precisely constituted in this arena of significations, in which affect and cognition live a contradictory relationship, composing a unity of opposites, which take place in this movement, producing significations as an expression of historical, social and individual subjectivity at the same time.