Senses of work for high school teachers during pandemic

Abstract

This article presents part of the results of a master's degree research project, which aimed to understand the meanings of teaching work during the period of remote activities, during the coronavirus pandemic. To this end, it is based on the understanding of Historical-Cultural Psychology that the objective world has its subjective expression, which constitutes an objective-subjective unity. This unity translates to people as subjective senses, composed of affective and cognitive processes. To produce the data, five focus group meetings were held with four high school teachers from a public school, located in the interior of São Paulo, and the qualitative methodology of the Nuclei of Sense was used for the analysis. The results indicated the formation of two nuclei: I) Pandemic context and teaching suffering, and II) Structural issues and teaching work, both synthesized mediations, through which it was demonstrated that the pandemic intensified processes of suffering that had already been affecting teachers, and that the use of Information and Communication Technologies - ICTs - contributed to the dissemination of neoliberal ideology in Education. The study consolidated the activity as the genesis of the senses, which, due to the interference of pandemic conditions, materialized the emptying of teaching work.