ENGLISH TEACHING AND COVID-19

TEACHING ENGLISH TO GIRLS

AND BLACK STUDENTS:

Problems faced even before the pandemic

OBSERVATÓRIO ENSINO DA
LÍNGUA INGLESA
November 11, 2021

The crisis of the new coronavirus made access to education difficult for black and poor students. In English teaching, it is necessary to consider issues that have already distanced this group from learning the language.

Themes: Covid-19; remote teaching; teachers; language teaching; gender and social inclusion; identity; schools; inclusion

If inequality was already a reality in Brazilian education, in 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic — with closed schools and the adoption of remote education — the situation worsened even more. The report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (Unicef) “Scenarios of School Exclusion in Brazil” (in Portuguese) points out that, at the end of 2020, more than 5 million Brazilian students aged 6 to 17 were without access to schools.

Of this total, more than 40% were represented by children aged 6 to 10 years, an age group in which education was almost universal in the country before the crisis of the new coronavirus. In this scenario, young people from poor, black, brown and indigenous families were the most affected.

Another data, presented by Pnad Covid, a survey by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), points out the supply of materials for attending classes from home: among white students in elementary school, 89% received school activities in the pandemic, among black and brown students this percentage drops to 77%.

It is a worrying context and, based on this information, we can make a cut about the exclusion of black children and teenagers and even girls in education, more specifically in English teaching. What factors further hindered these students’ access to knowledge of the language? What were the problems already faced in language learning before the pandemic?

Difficulty in accessing technology

Maria Carolina Almeida de Azevedo, an English teacher at the Rio de Janeiro Municipal Department of Education and a Master’s student in Education at the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), reinforces that the students who had the most difficulties or were unable to participate in remote education in the pandemic were those with lower purchasing power and mostly blacks. “Virtual life demands capital for us to integrate with it. Thus, the context of isolation, generated by the pandemic, brought to the surface old problems such as the lack of investments in the field of education, social and racial problems”.

These issues are evidenced in the study “Educational inequalities and the Covid-19” (in Portuguese), by Afro-Cebrap, which pointed out the difficulties in accessing technology to study during this period of remote education. Most students in the literacy stages (68%), elementary school (67%) and high school (59%) do not have internet access at home. According to the document, Brazil does not support public, universal and high-quality remote education.

The Unicef ​​report indicates that, in this situation, students who were already excluded from education were even further away from having access to it, either because of the lack of technological resources or because of the poverty scenario that was further aggravated by the pandemic.

Regarding the teaching of English, Maria Carolina reports what she found during the online classes: “Even being young and being born in the digital age, I think the biggest dilemma for the students was adapting to remote learning and, above all, access to instruments that make studying in this modality viable, such as computer, quality internet and smartphone”.

The teacher adds that girls and black students had a lower participation in classes due to the difficulty in accessing these resources. This fact is corroborated by the study “The education of black girls in times of pandemic: the deepening of inequalities” (in Portuguese), by the Geledés Institute of the Black Woman. The document, carried out through interviews with 105 families in the city of São Paulo (372 people from the outskirts of the city) between September and November 2020, exposes that inequalities in Brazilian education due to the Covid-19 crisis affected the whole of society , but widened the gap in education for white and non-white students.

The Afro-Cebrap study also brings data from the Continuous Annual PNAD 2019 , from the IBGE, on the difference in the use of technologies to participate in the remote teaching model: of the poorest 20%, 34% of elementary school students and 25% high school students do not have access to a cell phone with an Internet connection, compromising access to online classes and teaching materials.

However, even among children and young people whose families have a smartphone, participation in virtual classes is not guaranteed, as many do not have a quality internet connection. The document considers the large consumption of data with the use of video platforms and for downloading materials, limiting the access of the poorest children and adolescents. In many places, there is also no connection stability, compromising participation in remote learning.

And, for families that have a connected device, there can still be difficulty in learning and interacting. After all, we know how difficult it is to follow the content on the cell phone, which has a small screen, making it difficult for children and teenagers to have the necessary attention to attend classes.

The publication by the Geledés Institute indicated that the computer is the device used by 63.64% of white families in remote classes and by 23.81% of black families. And it concludes that the main equipment for distance learning for white families was the computer and for black families the cell phone.

It is worth noting that, unlike many private schools, virtual classes in public institutions were held asynchronously, that is, with recorded classes or with guidelines for using materials and carrying out activities through resources such as WhatsApp. In this way, it further compromised the contact between students and teachers.

There is also an issue related to high school students who, due to difficulties in monitoring classes, were unable to prepare to take the National High School Exam (Enem) test. The Afro-Cebrap study focuses on this aspect, indicating losses, consequently, for the competition for places in higher education institutions through the Unified Selection System (SiSU), for entrance exams in general, the University for All Program (Prouni) and of the Student Financing Fund (Fies).

Lack of monitoring by a family member

Even those students who had the technology to monitor classes may not have had the expected participation and performance. This is because many children and young people are alone at home to watch the content, that is, without the presence of a family member, which occurs mainly in black and poor families.

With income difficulties further compounded by the pandemic, parents and other caregivers had to leave home to work even when Covid-19 transmission rates were high. And, in this context, many black girls had to assume domestic tasks, thus compromising their dedication to studies (see below).

“Black people are the majority in the services considered essential during the coronavirus pandemic: they are assistants and nurses, urban cleaning workers, cleaning women, telemarketing operators, security guards, construction workers, among other professions that make them more vulnerable to contagion”, points out the study by Geledés.

Among the families interviewed in the study, 28.1% of the responsible persons worked in person since the beginning of the pandemic. However, in terms of race, this percentage is 33.72% for heads of black families and 8% for white families.

According to Maria Carolina, the financial and psychological support for families that lost their income in the pandemic is important, “which made many responsible devote more time to recover the survival of their families than to support their children’s school life.”

Black girls and housework

In addition to the lack of adequate technology to monitor classes and, often, the absence of monitoring by a family member for activities, there is yet another aspect that hampered access to education in the pandemic of black and working girls: housework.

“In an even more precarious teaching in the remote and emergency mode, students that are mothers need to deal with comprehensive care for the children, in addition to women in general needing to take care of other people close to them and have other household tasks that make their studies difficult”, highlights the publication of Afro-Cebrap.

In the interviews carried out with professors in the study by the Geledés Institute, this data is reinforced. One of the professors reports: “Structurally, in relation to white girls, black girls are at a disadvantage; if, before the pandemic, they only had to help at home during the shift, they must be responsible all day for the household chores and taking care of the siblings”.

The teachers interviewed for the study consider that the main impacts of schooling of black girls in the pandemic are: school dropouts, violation of rights and increase in violence and social inequalities.

Thus, one of the conclusions of the Geledés publication is that closed schools leave many children and young people without access to monitoring and a protection network, increasing the degree of vulnerability of this group, to situations of domestic violence and violence in the territories.

The institute also highlights that the impacts of the coronavirus crisis on the education of black students show that the encounter of gender and race oppressions establish different places and chances in society. “Although some information reveals the reproduction of gender stereotypes and racism in interpersonal relationships in educational practices, these two elements structurally limit the school trajectory of black girls and negatively impact their future prospects”.

Representativeness in English teaching

As it was possible to observe, the pandemic made access to education difficult, especially for the poorest, black people and black girls. Added to this, in the case of English classes, there are other aspects that, regardless of remote classes and other difficulties, can also compromise the learning of black children and adolescents.

Maria Carolina highlights that, if we analyze the history of Brazilian society, it appears that the black population only had free access to public education after the 1960s. Therefore, the current situation of lack of access and high dropout rates for black students of school is the result of structural racism, to which Brazil has been subjected since the beginning of the 16th century and which still structures society.

“The lack of access or the restricted access of the black population to the teaching of English is also permeated by these historical absences. In fact, English teaching was aimed at maintaining the privileges and supremacy of a Eurocentric and racist social class”, explains the professor.

Black girls need, continues Maria Carolina, in addition to free access to quality English education to promote their skills and knowledge of other cultures, that their identities are also present in language teaching.

According to data from a survey carried out by Instituto Unibanco in 2019, one of the main reasons for dropping out of school in high school is the disconnection of curriculum content from the lives of young people. “Black girls need to feel motivated and belonging to what they learn and, according to Bell Hooks [author, teacher, feminist theorist, artist and American anti-racist activist], the teacher is responsible for ensuring that everyone’s presence is recognized and that it must be present in the pedagogical practices”, emphasizes the teacher.

Maria Carolina argues that it is important to bring the images of black kings, queens, scientists, heads of state, teachers or warriors, in addition to contextualizing these contents as much as possible, bringing the diversity of ethnicities, languages, values, biomes, mythology and African cultures to the language teaching.

It is also necessary to criticize and rethink hegemony and the imposition of an English teaching standard that ranks cultures, knowledge and societies. This is because it supports the maintenance of education focused and designed to meet the demands of the elites and social and racial inequality — reinforced by the stereotypes present in the methodologies, teaching materials, classroom dynamics and microviolence also present in this language experience in the school space.

In relation to the gaps left by remote teaching, not only in English, but in all subjects, Maria Carolina believes that the government’s investment in the maintenance of schools is necessary, with structural improvement works and policies for valuing education professionals.

“They not only suffered salary cuts in this pandemic period, but they had to prepare to work in remote learning by investing in a structure — with the acquisition of more modern computers, smartphones, audio and video devices and internet connection — that would make these actions feasible”, she says. Finally, regarding the gap in learning the school content as a whole, the teacher believes that this recovery will be gradual.

Image: Joyce Cury / Banco de imagens Fundação Lemann

Available at: https://www.inglesnasescolas.org/en/headline/teaching-english-to-girls-and-black-students-problems-faced-even-before-the-pandemic/. Also available in Portuguese at: https://www.inglesnasescolas.org/headline/ensino-de-ingles-para-meninas-e-estudantes-negros-problemas-ja-enfrentados-antes-da-pandemia/. Accessed on November 11, 2021.