I am a counsellor and a trainer. I studied engineering and I have been working in adult learning for 20 years. My main fields of interest are digital and e-learning. I am an EPALE Ambassador and Lifelong Learning Activist in Portugal for Digital Skills aspects. In the Community of Practice that we set up to support each other in the area of adult education, we were talking about unusual and demanding situations that we had had to overcome.

Stories of Confined Navigators

"Schools will close!” On March 12 it became clear that the premonitory movement of many parents, teachers and trainers was going to accelerate and gain strength.  I now believe that everyone must assess the level of risk they feel comfortable with.  Whether that be in a mass gathering or in a meeting of six people.

Open communication channels

The first step was well perceived by all: to open channels of communication between students, trainees, teachers and trainers. I tried to be helpful in the ad-hoc group created on Facebook E-Learning apoio that today has 29,000 members.  I also tried to support the sharing of thoughts and experiences in the #eagoraead promoted by professors of the Open University António Teixeira and José Mota.
Sharing opinions, pointing out experiences, highlighting good practices, recommending products and cases, collaborating in the positions and mission of the European Platform for Lifelong Learning, were the main objectives of that phase.

To Translate Unesco in group collaboration

In this collaborative dynamic I encouraged the creation of an ad-hoc group to translate the first manual edited by UNESCO on the Chinese experience of Distance Learning already in a pandemic situation (by February). You can find it in the Praça das redes Networks with the tittle Manual de apoio à aprendizagem flexível (in the original version@: https://iite.unesco.org/news/handbook-on-facilitating-flexible-learning-during-educational-disruption/ . A collaborative work that brought together, with a common goal, more than 15 academic professionals ranging from those who work with children, to those who worked in higher education or adult education. It is a community that continues to function and exchange practices and ideas. You can read more about this article in A necessidade aguça o engenho, o trabalho em rede faz o resto. It is much more exciting when the work is done by several hands and works.

Save the seeds

And to read, read a lot and share ideas. Look at this one that came to me on the day I wrote this article. A comment by Stephen Downes on the article Reopening school: what it might look like by Jennifer Gonzalez published in Cult of Pedagogy in May 2020 "the author touches on the obvious question: what was produced in Covid19's emergency is not to throw away, because it represents a lot of work, sweat and learning by doing. No! It is the seed that remains and serves as a backup but also to make the reverse way of putting yourself at the service of face-to-face education in a path that has been made parallel and that will gain much more if it is made of bends and collaboration!"