“I Don’t Know if I Can Handle It All”: Students’ Affect During Remote Education in the COVID-19 Pandemic in Brazil

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted society in different areas. In education, several reports show the deleterious effects of the disease on the physical and mental health of students, family members, and teachers around the world. Also, in Brazil, affect studies indicate the prevalence of anxiety, stress, and depression among students. The present research, of a qualitative nature, explores what it means, under the lens of affect and from the student’s perspective, to experience remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic. An online questionnaire of 41 closed- and open-ended questions was given to 363 students from a public school in southeastern Brazil. This article analyzes the affective fields that emerged from the discursive textual analysis of the students’ responses (n = 100). Four affective fields were categorized: friends, classes, home, and teachers; intersecting emotions, attitudes, values, beliefs, and motivation. In general, students expressed more negative than positive affect but a positive disposition toward face-to-face classes. Boys focused their affect more on classes, while girls on teachers. The affective fields allow us to consider the friends–home–teachers tripod as fundamental to overcoming the phenomenon of affective fatigue that has been identified.

Pandemic, Higher Education, and a Developing Country: How Teachers and Students Adapt to Emergency Remote Education

“…Conversely, students faced challenges to different extents and types such as limited teacher scaffolds, overloaded lesson activities, inadequate learning resources, financial-related problems, poor learning environment, mental health struggles, conflict with home responsibilities, and more (Rotas & Cahapay, 2020). This finding is similar to studies from other developing countries asserting that students experienced ineffective learning while in the middle of a pandemic (Comelli et al, 2021;Noori, 2021;Twinamasiko et al, 2021). At the start of the pandemic, many Filipinos expressed their negative sentiments and emotions such as anger, fear, sadness, and surprise (Garcia, 2020).…”