Monological Education and Pandemic: "The Return of Those Who Never Went"

• In Event: "It's Our Responsibility as Teacher Educators": Toward Justice in Brazilian Public Schooling

Abstract

Educational research into classroom discourse over the course of the last four decades has documented the prevalence of teacher talk and control; questions are predominantly closed or factual, students' responses often do not exceed three words, and teachers’ feedback is mainly about correctness. However, there is increasing evidence that through dialogue students can learn more about the topic under study, retain the learning gains for longer times, and develop reasoning skills. These findings have been transformed into strategies to promote educational dialogues, making them richer and meaningful.
Since this approach is not widely embraced in Brazilian public schools, we planned a classroom-based intervention focused on the development of teachers’ dialogic practices facilitated by a school-based teacher professional development program. In March of 2020, when the first workshop was ready to be conducted, the pandemic arrived in Brazil and demanded the closure of all schools. Without the object under scrutiny in hand, that is, the teacher-students’ verbal interactions, the initial intervention was postponed.
In this paper, we reflect on what happened to classroom dialogue during the pandemic. First, we present a brief review of the highly unequal numbers of households with computer and internet access, which were transformed into the basic means of the new educational platform. Second, based on data from the municipality level and interviews with two teachers, we discuss the school practice during pandemic times through the lenses of dialogical education: the conditions teachers have been facing and how they are portraying solutions to interact with students. Finally, we expand the notion of monologue and dialogue to include more than verbal interactions in our analysis of schooling in the pandemic. In short, we argue that despite teachers' effort and agency to overcome the situation, the constraints imposed by concrete conditions prompted the return of a monologic model of education, more unequal, non-inclusive, and devoid of students' voices.

Authors

• Juliano Camillo, Federal University of Santa Catarina

• Leonardo Lago, University of Sao Paulo

• Cristiano Mattos, Universidade de São Paulo

• Gail Buffalo, City College of New York