COVID-19 and multicultural education in Brazil

Abstract

The paper aims to discuss the effects of COVID-19 on the Brazilian educational scenario. It analyses educational directives in the pandemic times, gleaning possibilities and challenges for the curriculum in the different levels of schooling. The focus of the study is twofold: it theoretically discusses the need for multicultural intersectional educational perspectives in culturally diverse countries and it analyses educational policies issued by the Brazilian National Council for Education at the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting ways by which they could enhance a multicultural, intersectional perspective in their recommendations. Based on a multicultural perspective, the paper argues that the technical dimension that permeates educational directives, relevant though it may be, should arguably be accompanied by ideas that could enhance the students' emotional, affectionate and cultural dimensions, in complex times as those lived by them and by all in the middle of a pandemic.

Self-perception of university teachers on their digital teaching competence: the case of Peru

“…In Latin America, the various advances in the digitalization of education in times of COVID-19 have been reported, as in the case of Argentina (Perrotta, 2021), which presents the efforts in public universities for teaching and learning, research and internationalization activities. There are also reports of the cultural adaptation that has had to be generated in Brazil, considering social distancing at the beginning of the pandemic (Ivenicki, 2021;Prata-Linhares et al, 2020). In Chile, it was reported that this drastic digitalization process due to the pandemic ultimately benefited their learning due to the challenge of rapid adaptation (Sepulveda-Escobar & Morrison, 2020).…”

Remote teaching and learning

“…While education faces its losses in the face of social inequalities and the new challenges generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, another topic put up for debate is the preparation of teachers to deal with new teaching methods. In general, the teaching curriculum in Brazil has always been very small, and this in a pandemic context has expanded the problem of remote education since the concern of the public authorities is not just the ability of students to access remote teaching but also the performance of teachers in acting in this new format (Ivenicki, 2021).…”

Multicultural Education in Schools: An Effort to Strengthen Student’s Multicultural Competence

“…Education is one way to develop human resources in order to obtain social skills and individual development optimally in order to establish relationships between individuals and the community and the surrounding cultural environment. In addition, education is a process of humanizing humans where humans are expected to be able to understand themselves, other people, nature and their cultural environment [1]. Therefore, the basis of education cannot be separated from the culture that surrounds it as a consequence of the purpose of education, namely honing taste, initiative, and work.…”