Research and keep doing to make schools present in contexts of urban poverty in times of Covid

Abstract

In this article I propose to recover reflections arising from online meetings with professors, researchers, informal talks with 15 fellow teachers of different levels and modalities and, from my own experience as a teacher, researcher and tutor of the adult modality in the Buenos Aires Conurban, at the Municipality of Gral. San Martín (Buenos Aires- Argentina). Thinking about the teaching task, its invisibility and disappointment in times of COVID in contexts of extreme poverty, implies thinking of a present school, an all-terrain institution, which becomes effective because there are teachers who put their bodies on it and support it. Teachers juggling homework and corrections, their family routines, raising their own children, delivering merchandise and the lack of it, emergency calls outside school hours, requests for helping in adding something to their students' pots, and graduates, constant communications with women who maintain dining rooms and picnic areas in the neighborhoods close to the schools to refer a family that needs to receive a food ration, or having  contact with students who do not respond to their messages, etc. In this context, I consider that it is essential to reflect  the irruption of desire inside schools,  and the room we make for it . A Reflection that allows us to create (by ourselves) spaces, break times, to rethink our work. In even more uncertain times, the question of who we are  and who we want to be, gives us back the breath of fresh air that the urgency takes away from us, becoming in that separate point, a parenthesis where we can take refuge.