Navigating the Uncharted Waters of Emergency Remote Teaching: An Exploration of English Language Teaching in Brazil Through the Lens of Complexity Theory

Abstract

In Brazil, adaptations to the digital world in the public and private schools, during the pandemic, was a great challenge for educators, who in addition to not having initial and continuing training for remote work and not having prior training, they had to deal with a certain unpredictability and (re)learning to teach in new ways. Faced with this scenario, schools used, as a solution to suspending classroom classes, digital learning resources, inspired by the Distance Learning modality. Given this pandemic context, the following question arose for me: What are the impacts caused using digital media in English classes during the COVID-19 pandemic? So, in this research, it was observed how the practices mediated by the digital media of 6 elementary and high school English teachers, from state public schools in São João Del Rei, in Minas Gerais, Brazil, were affected by the Emergency Remote Teaching. For this purpose, as a data collection method, an online semi-structured questionnaire was applied in order to get to know the research participants and to survey their teaching reality facing the remote work; and a semi-structured interview was carried out via the Zoom platform aiming at exploring, describing and better explaining the research object, in addition to proving and contrasting data obtained in the questionnaire. After that, the data were analyzed and interpreted in the light of the Complex Emergency Conditions, that is, Internal Diversity, Redundancy, Neighbor Interactions, Decentralized Control and Enabling Constraints, proposed by Davis and Simmt (2003) and Davis and Sumara (2006). It was found that these conditions contributed to understanding the possible patterns that emerged from the various relationships that occurred between the different agents mediated by digital media.