Research, Internationalization and Training of Teachers in Pandemic Times – Microethnographic Studies

Abstract

The need to reformulate teaching practices in the face of the methodological change related to COVID-19 forced educational researchers to shift the primary field of their research – the school and its actors – to a field still unknown to most, the virtual ground. The importance of listening to the subjects involved in the processes of learning of the teaching profession, with all the artefacts related to it – students, school space, principals, peers, families, and communities – forced the paradigm shift. Due to the pandemic, the ethnographic studies in education, rich in their interaction with the subjects, due to the pandemic, placed the researcher (participant observer) and the participant (subject involved and able to redirect the investigation) in a hybrid relationship in which physical presence began to be mediated and conditioned by the rules of the Ministries of Health of each country involved in the research. The physical presence of the researcher with the subjects, allows an understanding of their position in the space (classroom choreography) and their interaction/performance concerning the other (teacher, student, family, managers, community). This dynamic was altered by the impossibility of being present and by introducing the third interlocutor – a webcam used for online communications. Facing this challenge and bearing in mind the need to maintain the researcher’s relationship with the participants of the study, we share the research narrative provided so far. The aim of this paper is to observe/understand the influence of the pandemic on teaching practices, using different lenses to explore the hybrid interconnections. There were used microethnographic strategies in order to find out the opinions of the subjects involved in the research.