Abstracts Communications and the Arts

Electronic communication between teachers and families during remote teaching in the public network of Viçosa (MG)

by Ana Paula Machado Gomes

The objective of this study was to know and analyze the characteristics of electronic communication between teachers and family members of students attending the early years of elementary education in public schools in the city of Viçosa (MG), using WhatsApp during the Covid-19 epidemic in Brazil. It was assumed that the constitution of groups of family members and teachers in the electronic messaging application will affect the forms of interaction between families and school. The research was developed in two stages. Initially, data were generated by means of an electronic questionnaire applied to teachers of the public education system, both municipal and state, who work in the early years of elementary school. In the second stage, semi-structured interviews were conducted with three teachers and the six mothers. The corpus of transcribed interviews was analyzed according to the assumptions of content analysis, according to Bardin (2011). The results of this research point to the importance of interaction and communication between these two socializing instances in the children's schooling processes, to the relevance of the form of communication between teachers and families in real time and to the initiatives of schools in order to maintain the direction of communication with families. The analyses also indicated that although remote teaching was an emergency measure and contributed to the intensification of communication between teachers and families, which became daily, it also revealed the existing inequalities, making them more evident in remote teaching, given the digital exclusion existing in Brazilian society. Keywords: Family-school relations. Family educational practices. Electronic communication between teachers and families.