The Creation of a Collaborative Photo-Book. Exploring Secondary School Teachers´ Working Lives during the Pandemic in Argentina

This presentation will depict the process of creation of a collaborative photo-book between secondary school teachers and researchers during the pandemic -from July 2020 up to April 2021. Teachers from a technical school in the City of Buenos Aires were invited to express with words and images their work, feelings and challenges while trying to continue with schooling from their homes at an extraordinary uncertain and difficult time of “emergency education” (Dussel 2020). The team was encompassed by researchers, teachers, a pedagogic consultant, and a photographer and social communicator. The number of participants varied over time. The process of producing, sharing, and curating images and texts was not straightforward. At the beginning, teachers shared images from others, such as those produced by cartoonists or downloaded from the internet. After few weeks, we understood that our assumption that taking pictures and thinking with images was an easy task to perform was wrong. We soon realized that it was difficult to speak certain things out (such as emotions associated with the closing down of schools and the physical confinement of teachers, their students and researchers). However, despite the initial difficulties, teachers took pictures that affected us and helped us to visually narrate and think about what was difficult to say aloud. This visual exploration allowed us to map the affective, material and pedagogic reorganization of teachers´ working conditions. This paper will examine the collaborative research pathways of the collective creation of a photo-book about how the pandemic for Covid19 challenged teachers´ sense of professionalism, eroded fundamental aspects of schooling and offered an interdisciplinary research team the opportunity to produce dialogic, caring and creative strategies to collectively examine secondary schooling during the pandemic.