Surfing the Tsunami of Remote Education: the search for faculty formation in the waves-boxes, wipeouts, and caps during the Covid-19 pandemic

Abstract

Objective: Technology adoption theory (UTAUT) predicts the importance of factors such as utility, ease of use, structure, and social influence. With the pandemic, the contextual factor has added itself to this model. Covid-19 imposed the adoption of emergency remote education to enable the continuity of educational activity. In this context of forced adoption of remote education, technological pedagogical qualification became essential. However, because of social isolation, traditional teacher training spaces were not available. Thus, it was necessary to resort to alternative training spaces, other teacher qualifications (professional, pedagogical and academic) and reflection on practice (Schön, 1983, 2000) had to be used. With this context in mind, we sought to answer the research question: How has teacher training been reorganized in a moment of forced adoption of emergency teaching?

Method: Using data made available by the GoogleTrends tool, we conducted an autonomous search for terms associated with instrumental technological teacher training.

Results: Our preliminary analyses of results show that the first wave of teacher training had a more instrumental characteristic with teachers seeking subsidies on how to record online classes, for example; in a second wave, we notice a more methodological orientation with the concern on how to adopt active methodologies in online teaching. The tsunami of remote teaching was surfed by teachers with the support of alternative teaching training spaces, such as You Tube videos and tutorials available on the Internet. Despite the fits and starts, continuity was possible with adaptation in record time.

Contributions: it enables a register of the teaching experience in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil; it allows us to glimpse the usefulness of the use of Big Data tools such as Google Trends in research on the context in which education takes place; it brings another possibility of accountability of information about teaching.