What happened in schools during the pandemic? Teacher engagement in a Mexican indigenous school

Abstract

According to recent studies, the multi-grade schools of the indigenous subsystem in Mexico were those where the most harmful socio-educational effects of the pandemic fell, due to the articulation of old social inequalities with new school asymmetries linked to the virtualization of education and the digital marginalization of these mainly rural educational centers. By also considering the pre-existing panorama of structural and institutionalized racism that condemns the majority of indigenous schools to precariousness, this text aims to contribute to understanding how the schools of this Mexican public educational subsystem locally faced the conditions of fragility posed by the pandemic contingency, paying attention to the potential autonomy granted by their condition of "being on the margin". Based on interviews, observations and conversations conducted mainly with teachers of a bilingual multigrade elementary school located in the heart of the ñäñho (or Otomí) indigenous region of the central state of Querétaro, we propose that the centrality of the principal's action in school-community relations, as well as the role of community awareness in the teachers' commitment, were key to the development of strategies that sought to mitigate the interruption of the right to education for Otomí children during the school closures. These strategies consisted mainly of teacher and distance monitoring of the students' situation, partial reopening of the school, attention to mothers, and monitoring of homework through a workbook. Likewise, we describe from the point of view of the school actors what were some of the obstacles experienced in adapting to the so-called distance education.

Keywords

• pandemic
• teachers
• indigenous education
• multigrade school
• indigenous children.