School in times of crisis: psychoanalytic listening to childhood, adolescence and teaching work in the post-pandemic period

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic brought about a radical disruption in the times and spaces of educational experience, calling for attentive listening to the subjective effects produced by the distancing from this territory of connection and transmission. This article, based on an intervention-research conducted in 2022, proposes a psychoanalytic analysis of the experiences of children, adolescents, and educators upon returning to in-person classes. The aim is not to evaluate the intervention itself, but to extract, from the discursive and graphic material produced — drawings, speech, posters, diaries, and chronicles — evidence of the psychic work generated during this transitional moment. The listening that took place through workshops and sharing circles made it possible to gather traces of the pandemic’s unprecedented nature: the erasure of the school among children in early childhood education, the fraying of social bonds and of future expectations among adolescents, and a feeling of exhaustion among educators. Even so, amid the effects of helplessness, movements of subjective and collective reinvention of school practices emerged. The analysis of the material was carried out collectively by a group of researchers involved in different ways with the intervention, allowing for a triangulation of perspectives and listening. It is concluded that the school, as a space of transmission and symbolic inscription, plays a structuring role in the formation of social bonds, making it essential to create mechanisms that promote the symbolization of malaise within the pandemic context.