Social representations on remote teaching during covid-19 pandemic in teenage students in a non-bilingual public school in Barranquilla, Colombia

Abstract

This article presents the results of a research aimed at understanding the social representations of secondary school students about English classes during the Covid-19 pandemic in an educational institution in Barranquilla. The process of digital adoption of methodologies and tools in the pandemic lead to new conditions and dynamics for the development of classes which in turn, trigger changes in school achievement, performance and learning experiences. The present research involved 8th grade students who had experienced the temporary change from face-to-face to remote English classes. The method used was the structural approach of social representations, along free association techniques to describe its contents, and hierarchization techniques complemented to Likert-type scales to create a hypothesis about the central core. The results show that the most salient element is attitudes, significantly polarized between approval and disapproval of remote English classes, with "Learning", "Fun", "Easy", as well as "Difficult", "Complicated" or "Stressful" being central terms. The findings point to the need to explore further the heterogeneity of students' conditions of access to technology, and their personal experiences, which would merit future studies based on such experiences.