The Restructuring of Teachers’ Work within the Confluence of the Post-Pandemic and Hyper-Technological Eras

• In Event: Education Activism as Affirmative Resistance: Examples of Real Educational Utopias Through and Outside the State

Proposal

This paper discusses the global restructuring of teachers’ work, using mixed methods data from research in Brazil and Portugal. The nature of teacher’s work has changed dramatically as a result of an international agenda that emphasizes large-scale assessments, performance-based accountability, privatizations and, more recently, the use of digital instruments and artificial intelligence (AI). Our analysis starts from a post-pandemic context, in which these changes in teachers’ work processes have intensified, with the acceleration of the process of incorporating AI into school routines, which demands new conditions and regulations for work and training. Our focus seeks to understand the varied and asymmetric forms that these changes assume in different national contexts (Brazil and Portugal), and how they have affected global demands for fulfilling the right to education.
In this paper, we discuss data that demonstrate the ways the impact of this shift in teachers’ work affects students differently depending their socioeconomic and physical conditions. We also explore the impact of the pandemic as face-to-face classes were suspended, and how some technologies adopted during the exercise of remote teaching work were, despite being insufficient, incorporated into school routines even after returning to face-to-face activities.
The challenges in the post-pandemic are many and diverse regarding education. On the one hand, it is necessary to recover lost time in student learning and socialization. On the other hand, it is necessary to discuss the changes that occurred in teachers’ work at the accelerated pace at which they were incorporated, opening space for greater privatization through platforms and technological tools in public schools and for the intensification of teachers' work.

Authors

• Dalila Andrade Oliveira, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

• Sofia Viseu, Instituto de Educação, Universidade de Lisboa