Abstract
This chapter describes how Argentine teachers at the pre-school, primary, and secondary levels adapted to emergency distance education during the Preventive and Compulsory Social Isolation (ASPO) that was established in Argentina due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. From an exploitative-descriptive strategy, a non-probabilistic survey was carried out through an online questionnaire during June 2020, whose sample consisted of 411 cases. Among the results, it is highlighted that the teachers applied their knowledge and skills prior to the pandemic, but they also had to learn to use new resources to adapt to the educational conditions of the pandemic, which led to greater effort and difficulties for older teachers. In accordance with this, the predominance of joy and pride in the younger teachers indicates that they were more satisfied than the older ones. It is concluded that despite the fact that all teachers expressed having adapted, the older ones encountered greater difficulties and, consequently, had to resort to a greater diversity of adaptation strategies.
TopBackground
Formal system education in the context of 4.0 society is an important vehicle to develop skills, abilities and attitudes about technology and digital tools and guarantee the integration of children for the future decades. It is considered part of an individual's well-being, avoiding that technology controls people or that people could be isolated from their local or global communities. Moreover, digital skills have a snowball dynamic as it allows to increase pathways to another's learning and skills. That is to say, in 4.0 societies it's not sufficient to know how to read and write if not moreover it must be how to use the power of technology and the internet (West, Kraut and Wi Chew, 2019).
Before the Covid-19 pandemic, studies analyzed distance education and “blended learning” (Gossenheimer et al., 2017; Hsu & Hsieh, 2014), focusing both on aspects related to students' experiences and intellectuals skills required for distance learning (Ateya et al., 2015; Arroyo et al., 2015; Terras & Ramsay, 2015), as in the difficulties or barriers identified by educators in the teaching processes (Kowalczyk, 2014). Some of them showed that students of the net generation or digital natives used technology to stay connected and entertained, but their Internet literacy skills were scarce. This implied a challenge for educational institutions to adequately teach the use of electronic sources that would allow satisfactory future development (Combes, 2008). Possibilities of implementing digital resources for learning in preschool children were also analyzed (Ciolan, et al., 2014), or using social networks such as Facebook for teaching foreign languages, finding that it can become an area of genuine communication for the completion of homework (Buga, et al., 2014). In cultural terms, an integration of values from the Asian tradition was considered to take advantage of the potential of the digital society (Kim, 2002).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Digital Teaching Practices: Concrete actions that aim to concretise the formal teaching process, such as content development, problem-solving activities, corrections, evaluations and communication with parents, management, and peers.
Isolation: Implies physical separation to prevent the spread of the virus. For example It implied that people were forced to stay at home and go out only to basic needs without going to their workplaces, in addition to the prohibition of travel on roads, highways and public spaces, with the exception of activities and services considered essential.
Digital skills: Skills to use digital devices, communication applications and networks to access, manage and exploit information. They enable individuals to produce and share digital content, communicate and collaborate, and solve problems for effective and creative self-fulfillment in life, learning, work, and wider social activities.
Perceptions: Naturalised ways of organising the set of impressions that impact on the social agent, in his or her exchanges with the socio-environmental context, and which are accumulated and reproduced.
Bodies: Dialectic between a phylogenetic logic, which articulates the organic and the environment, a subjective dimension from the self-reflection of the self as the centre of gravity and a dimension of socialisation of the body, from habits, gestures and hexis.
Sociedad 4.0: Economic and social processes that were structured by the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution” from the rapid development of social networks and the consequent increase in their commercial value. The information and communication technologies present in multiple dimensions of social life, from productive processes and new forms of work to everyday interaction with others, reconfigure social experiences, practices, bodies and emotions between online and offline worlds.
Emotions: In its social character, emotions are understood as built and constructed from the interaction of the subject with the world and with others, affecting the production and regulation of the social order.
Distance Education: Formal education situation where there is a separation of teachers and learners in space and time and where pedagogical strategies are determined by the technologies available at any given time.