Pedagogical continuity in pandemic: mediators and digital tools appropriation

Abstract

In 2020, due to the implementation of emergency health measures to prevent the spread of CoViD-19 in Argentina, secondary education was suddenly virtualized. In this exceptional context, the educational community sought strategies to sustain educational trajectories and guarantee the link with students. The lack of experience in virtual education at this educational level meant that different people involved in the learning process had to make use of multiple resources to achieve the agreed objectives, and the need for mediators to accompany the processes of appropriation of technologies became evident. Although adolescents frequently use social networks and mobile devices, the use of virtual educational platforms and office software functions was not frequent. Thus, people played the role of mediators for the development of the necessary skills to study in the virtual teaching modality. In this line, the objective of this article is to describe the role of the different mediating figures linked to the students that allowed or facilitated the sustainability of the educational trajectories within the framework of “pedagogical continuity”. From the analysis of a corpus of data on digital interactions, collected in Carmen de Patagones in 2020-2021, in two public high schools, we detected different instances in which the importance of mediating figures involved in facilitating the participation of students with difficulties in connection and application management, among others, is visualized. In this sense, teachers, preceptors, family members and, to a lesser extent, classmates played a key role in sharing digital resources and knowledge.