School dropout in Youth and Adult Education during the covid -19 pandemic: a critical discourse analysis
outh and Adult Education (YAE). Critical Discourse Analysis. Covid-19. Remote Learning.
The research on school dropout in the period of the Covid-19 pandemic, based on school trajectories, constitutes a topic of great social relevance that leads to a reflection on the current education system, because the educational context has changed and this has brought new approaches on teachinglearning and, consequently, on public policies for the permanence of students in the school context. The objective was to discursively analyze how the Covid-19 pandemic contributed to explain the dropout rates and what this fact influenced the modes of action and identity representation of students and teachers of two public schools in the Federal District, during the period when classes were remote. The research is situated in the area of Linguistics, with the theoretical referential grounded in the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Fairclough (2001 and 2003), Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), Teun van Dijk (2011), Wodak (2003, 2004) Resende and Ramalho (2004, 2011), Resende (2006, 2009, 2018), Magalhães, Martins and Resende (2017), complemented by Thompson's (2011) studies on ideology; Critical Pedagogy with Freire (1997, 2021), Arroyo (2017) and Giroux (1997); and Decolonial Pedagogy with Walsh (2005, 2017), Mignolo (2003), Quijano (2007) and other authors who will ground this research. Ethnographic qualitative research was conducted. The field notes, the semi-structured interviews, the guiding documents of remote teaching and some reports on teaching in this period served as instruments of data generation and collection and also to organize and form the categories that composed the themes discussed in this research. Among the results obtained, we found that the main causes for dropping out of school are: the inability to use the technological tools used in this period, the learning difficulties caused by the absence of the teacher, and the work overload due to the care of children and students, especially for women. The contributions of this research will allow us to project education as a form of social change and also to have a more human and empathetic look at the school trajectories of EJA students, because only then will we have, in fact, a liberating education, as proposed in this study.