Virtual ethnography: Collection of teaching and learning experiences and construction of the subjectivities of teachers and students in times of pandemic

Abstract

The following article presents the results of an investigation carried out based on a virtual ethnography in the classroom in the context of the health contingency due to Covid-19. A situation affected the educational processes of the school at a social level. A situation caused a transfer from face-to-face to virtual due to the confinement generated as a response to prevent the spread of contagion among students and teachers.

This research aimed to understand the ethnographic accounts of teaching and learning experiences in times of pandemic through the virtual education of eleventh grade teachers and high school students. Another intention that guided this project was to generate an approach to the understanding of the dynamics in the classroom by the subjects themselves together with the construction of themselves, of their subjectivities, through their notions, the installed common sense, and their forms to communicate through virtuality and in the classroom.

The field work, which would involve the observation exercise, was carried out within the framework of the English subject; which, as it was possible to verify through this investigation, was crossed by the emergency and all those unexpected factors that the pandemic brought with it, something that did nothing but motivate the creativity of students and teachers. A brief overview of the theoretical approaches that allowed establishing the relationship and influence of the teaching and learning processes of a subject involves language and language, therefore, speech and communication, in the construction of stories is also presented of the subjects about their experiences, their life projects, in short, about their subjectivities.

Finally, the exercise carried out, despite involving technological mediation in the interaction and contact with the subjects in the field, did not prevent the work from being as rigorous as a "conventional" ethnography. This work made it possible to demonstrate that, even in a virtual ethnography, it is necessary to preserve the discipline of recording observations in the field diary, that is, to preserve the habit of writing, as well as to generate the necessary spaces to carry out ethnographic interviews. The other conclusions arose from the observation made in the classroom and some suggestions and recommendations generated from the ethnography carried out shared.