Educating in Time of Global Pandemic: Pedagogical Consultancy as a Response to Educational Distress

The global pandemic caused by the Covid-19 virus and the measures taken to face it have upset the organization of individual and collective existence, with respect to time, spaces, relationships and habits that marked our daily life. The health emergency is soon becoming an economic, social, political, cultural, educational emergency, which forced to redefine in depth and radically the structure of whole society, the ways of taking care and cure, of using services, to move, to socialize, to communicate, to produce, purchase and consume tangible and intangible goods, to educate and teach. Therefore, schools and educational services are in the middle of a sudden change that has affected both education professionals (educators, teachers) and pupils. The emergency has accentuated the already existing inequalities and created new forms of educational poverty, discrimination and social exclusion. A strong investment of resources has thus become essential in the educational world, to re-invent one’s work, one’s professional practices, as well as the adoption of strategies to promote inclusion and reduce the negative effects of the current crisis. Precisely to support education professionals in the persistence of the social hardship they face and in which they are themselves involved, the contribution of pedagogical consultancy in school and other educational contexts can be a valuable resource. This contribution intends to focus on the educational and transformative value of pedagogical consultancy in situations of educational and social distress. We will illustrate the theoretical, epistemological, methodological assumptions of an approach to pedagogical consultancy that uses phenomenological and sociomaterial theories to support educational professionals in a process of understanding and transforming distress. Based on these premises, our hypothesis is that consultancy should be conceived as a educational activity for teachers and educators. This means that the counselor must build a learning setting that makes it possible for educational professionals to explore their daily practices and learn from their experience, increasing knowledge of the different factors (subjective, social, relational, organizational, cultural and material), which produce habits, attitudes, speeches, educational actions. From this point of view, consultancy is not only a educational process, but it is also a research practice. The consultant’s task is not to transmit notions, nor to offer “recipes”, but to build the conditions for the group to assume an attitude of research, in order to promote reflection on the educational experience and distress.