Abstract:

Over the past 2 years, teachers felt that pupils had not the same opportunities to face the challenges arised by the pandemic. Family support is very different from one pupil to another, so the school had to rethink the ways to support them, a situation that highlight social and emotional challenges. With an unprecedented nature, the spread of COVID-19 was at the origin of strong emotions and sometimes irrational reactions. The importance of listening to pupils, of giving them the hope that school would continue to be a place of safe life and that learning makes sense, were challenges faced by teachers. In this article, we present the results of a study whose main objective was to understand how teachers managed pupils' emotions, communication and interpersonal relationships. Data was collected from teachers of the 2nd 3rd cycles of basic education (n=377), through a questionnaire survey that contained an open question, asking teachers to write about the challenges encountered in managing the pupils’ emotions. We use webQDA software for the interpretation of qualitative data. According to the semantic affinity, we chose the categories: anxiety, enthusiasm; empathy; respect; responsibility; determination and persistence. The results show that teachers were communication catalysts, with different types of intervention, making pupils feel that being afraid, sad or even angry is a normal attitude when emotional connections are lost. Learning will have been compromised by anxiety, lack of technological means, lack of motivation and failures in the internet network, leading us to issues of equity. For pupils, enthusiasm, curiosity to learn and persistence were oriented towards the external world, people and objects. Teachers considered that many young were at risk in terms of mental health, as they showed a lot of anxiety and it was not possible to get them and talk to them face to face. School is many times considered a way out, because of teachers play the role of “untrained psychologists, just to listen to them”. Thus, the monitoring carried out by teachers, even at a distance, was relevant, considering that pedagogy was (re)invented. It seems us relevant that teachers go on with a perspectives as optimistic as possible, to use different pedagogical strategies, such as narratives of solidarity that, for example, pupils have witnessed.

Keywords:

Pandemic, emotions, teachers, students, webQDA.