July 20th, 2021.
Health and education
VACCINATION AND
CLASSES
by Ana Colacino, Giovana Martinez, Natalia Del Bianco
The beginning of a dream… it is getting quite right! We all struggled through 2020 and a half 2021 with covid-19 and the online classes, but finally! The vaccines are here! But how is it working? And how classes are working so far with the presential classes coming back? So many questions that we tried to answer in the text below.
Vaccination against covid-19 in Brazil began on January 18, focused on immunization in priority groups that included people over 60 years of age and health professionals. In May, the Ministry of Health issued a statement establishing the priority order for vaccination of teachers and education professionals, including cleaning staff, among others. As usual, the newsletter team brought some precious testimony from teachers:
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“I was vaccinated at the beginning of June. It was a mix of feelings: on the one hand, I was very happy; on the other hand, I was even more anxious for everyone to be vaccinated soon. Particularly, I hope that the pace of vaccination accelerates and that we can resume classroom classes as soon as possible. At Unespar, as at most public universities, hybrid education would not be a solution, as we have few resources to make it possible. We will only be able to safely return to the face-to-face regimen when all teachers and students are properly vaccinated with both doses.” Fernanda Tarran. (Unespar teacher)
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“I was recently vaccinated and the experience was just amazing!! In addition to being a dose of immunizing, it is, above all, a dose of hope that things will return to normal and our students will be able, in addition to studying, interacting with friends, one of the things that most mark the memory of our children during the school period in early childhood! Everyone hopes to get up close, play, and have fun as soon as possible! That's what we hope.” Giovana (teacher, and part of the newsletter team).
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Once vaccination started, the number one priority was the health professionals who were working on the front line and the oldest people; after that, many people believed that the next ones should have been the teachers, as most people wanted and they still want classes to go back to being in person. However, teachers and education professionals began to be vaccinated in May, following the order of age (oldest first).
In June, the Government of Paraná released a calendar for vaccination against covid-19 for the entire population over 18 years old. Check it out!
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- June 4th to July 18th – 59 to 40 years old;
- July 19th to August 22nd – 39 to 30 years old;
- August 23rd to September 19th – 29 to 20 years old;
- September 20th to 30th – 19 and 18 years old.
As we said, it was at the beginning of May when teachers started to get vaccinated, as part of the plan to restart the presential classes. Like the other groups, elderly teachers and those who got comorbidities had priority in the vaccine line. A difference is that teachers who already had returned to school would get vaccinated firstly than those who are still teaching at home. Everything happened in parallel, education workers getting vaccinated and trained for the hybrid model, and schools slowly reopening.
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Now, the online classes have been a little messy since the beginning, but how it turns out in the second year of a pandemic? What is new in the reorganization of presential classes?
Well, the initial plan was to restart presential classes in February, but the SEED decided to postpone it a little further, in March, so we would be prepared for the hybrid model of classes. The new strategy was to use the period between February 18th and March 1rst to review a lot of content from 2020, which may have got students confused. Also, this period was used to help teachers, principals, and many other education workers to get prepared for the comeback of presential classes. Some new rules would be followed such as Social distancing between students, the prohibition of sharing materials among them, the student rotation for classes, masks, constant cleaning of the classrooms, hand sanitizer for students/workers, and so on. Besides that, a committee was formed in some schools to help spread information among students about the prevention of covid-19 in schools.
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The hybrid model also has some particularities that are worth taking a look at. In this model, teachers can teach simultaneously for students in the classroom and on a video call. The plan is to make a rotation scheme, where a student comes to the school one week and study at home in the next. Furthermore, students who wanted to come back to school must have a responsibility term signed by their parents or legal responsible. Those who did not want to come back to the presential class are not obligated to do so. The testimony by teacher Leila Barros brought us some interesting info about hybrid teaching in practice:
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“I will share my experience of hybrid teaching in a private school in Londrina - PR, and at first it seemed a daunting challenge, the biggest difficulty being to reconcile all students, but at the same time this challenge has a positive part, leading the teacher to think about significant changes in pedagogical practice so that learning takes place in a meaningful way, sometimes with more than half of the students online and some following in person how not to integrate technological tools? On the one hand, it is complex for the teacher to engage all of them, but on the other hand, we can consider it a positive experience, which is to constantly recover their practice, seeking to engage the student, moving towards a fun teaching, but without a shadow of a doubt it is a challenging teaching!”
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Until now, most of Apucarana’s schools had reopened, and even more, will open after the recess. With all this activity we hope that education will get back to normal, or at least to this “new normal” soon, and even more, that our students, teachers, and other education professionals can be able to keep themselves safe. Together we will overcome these tough times!