A commentary on Brazilian perspectives of lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic

Background: While the pandemic brought many challenges and disruption to an individual’s life, it also presented individuals with the opportunity to develop coping strategies and seek changes in their lives. Brazilians experiencing that moment disclosed the uniqueness of learned lessons. Methods: A commentary written by the interviewers and transcription team of 93 interviews conducted with Brazilians living in Canada and their relatives living in Brazil, identified trends in the experiential learning acquired during the pandemic. The Bloom’s taxonomy framed the review of team’s insights about learned lessons and newest skills and organization of evidence within the domains of cognitive, affective, and psychomotor learning. Results: Overall, there was a significant number and diversity of evidence about new learning and successful strategies that the participants implemented that promoted opportunities for learning. Identified evidence was in the affective (n=26), psychomotor (n=11) and cognitive (n=8) domains. Learning occurred in the affective domain which contributed to new self-perception, expanded awareness, new life priorities, renewed humanistic thoughts, increased valorization of time, life, and interpersonal relations. Conclusions: The findings of the lessons learnt from Brazilian participants are significant and highlight the unique perspectives of the positive benefits that resulted from a negative experience due to the pandemic. The significance of this interesting set of evidence indicates that in a near future the multidisciplinary community of scientists may definitively recalibrate the research focus and further explore how individuals learn and react during a pandemic.