Discourses about the pandemic in foreign language teacher education: Issues of identity and emotions

Abstract

The present article brings the results of a study investigating the discourses of foreign language teacher educators about the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects in terms of emotions and identities in the contexts where they work. The research was carried out in two publicly-funded federal universities, one in the south and the other in the southeast of Brazil, with the use of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The results show that the discourses constructed by participants at times emphasize the agency that the pandemic itself exerted upon the academic community, and at other times highlight the possibilities of this community to exercise its own agency in light of the challenges imposed by the health crisis. These results point to the necessity of reflecting upon how we may break with practices that were naturalized during the pandemic, at the same time as we attempt to resignify teaching-learning realities based on what we have learned during social distancing. The role of Linguistic Studies in this process is explored and discussed, particularly in regards to the possibilities that our field has to help establish educational policies and practices that address the new challenges that the university has faced in the post-pandemic era.