Teacher education in the emergency: pedagogies of care

ABSTRACT

Covid-19 pandemic sprang up a process that would drastically change the ways to teach and learn, deepening and accelerating the relationship between technologies and educational processes.The emergency situation challenged Universidad de la Republica (Udelar), which in turn designed and implemented remote teaching devices that allowed the continuity of higher education, minimizing academic impacts. Within this frame of action, the Virtual Learning Environments Program elaborated a Contingency Plan for teaching and learning, with an approach that considered pedagogy of care and critical digital pedagogy. One of the actions implemented was the Teacher Development Course "Teaching Online in Emergency Conditions".The experience constitutes the first massive online open course in Udelar and it is one of the few of this sort in Uruguay.The article describes this innovative experience in teacher pedagogical development, presents the theoretical and methodological approach, the process and main decisions concerning the course design.Also, it describes main participation profiles and principal achievements of the experience, with the objective of identifying potential points of departure for teaching professional development initiatives based on the MOOC model. MOOCs are still at an initial stage;however, the proposal ended up being an enriching alternative to approach teacher professional development.This experience adds up empirical data, to a necessary accumulation that would in time, allow more generalizable appreciations.