School Psychology, educational policies, and the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic: considerations from a cultural-historical approach

Abstract

This paper discusses the public policies of education in Brazil and the role of school and educational psychology taking Cultural-Historical Psychology as a foundation in the context of the Covid-19 Pandemic.  It briefly presents the great challenges of basic education based on the historical issues of exclusion from and in school and the processes of worsening social inequality with consequences for schooling. It suggests proposals for dealing with crisis situations through interdisciplinary, multi-professional and intersectoral actions, such as: a) to do a general diagnosis of the school situation, based on the possible data about the region, the families and the students, being able to carry out activities that make it possible to know more closely the difficulties and possibilities of access to knowledge and the social and economic needs presented; b) to rethink the spaces for interaction, the ways of establishing curricula, of encouraging the participation of all segments of the school; c) to enable collective projects, actions and strategies that have people as the protagonists of their stories, trajectories and pains that were the marks of this pandemic. It reaffirms, finally, the role that Cultural-Historical Theory has been playing in the process of discussion of central themes for basic education, considering the social, political, economic and cultural context as well as the processes of subjectification that constitute humanization.