Digital communication processes in the portuguese educational system in pandemic times

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is causing changes at different levels and the education sector has not been immune. The social distance that was imposed affected the way of experiencing the pedagogical relationship, with implications for the teaching and learning processes. The notion of physical classroom space has given way to a fluid frontier where digital artefacts occupy a central place, as it was necessary to reinvent a face-to-face culture in a culture mediated by digital. To respond to this transition, teachers had to quickly change and adapt differentiated strategies. Universidade Aberta, in partnership with the Ministry of Education of Portugal, designed and taught a training course for digital teaching in networks, with the objective of promoting, in non-higher education teachers, competences in the area of ​​distance education. This text focuses specifically on the forms of communication between the elements of the educational community created by the schools and whose representatives participated in that course. The data collected comes from the referred training course in which approximately 2300 teachers and principals from 756 clusters and non-clustered schools from all over the country participated. Following a qualitative methodology, based on critical discourse analysis, we focus on the communication dimension evidenced in the final works that took the format of school plans, carried out collaboratively. The analysis made it possible to identify the mechanisms to guarantee the occurrence of communications, to evaluate the effectiveness of the means mobilized and to relate the communicative processes with the feeling of belonging to the educational community.