Voices and images of hope: the rebirth of educational television in Ecuador in times of COVID-19

We must stay at home! That was the slogan on March 11, the day the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic. Needless to say, no country was prepared for this crisis; some were better prepared than others, though, and some adapted quicker than others. Our home country, Ecuador, was not among those countries, due to a myriad of variables that are at play at any given moment in our national reality: even if we had had a “manual” to respond to COVID-19, the subjacent chaos, incompetence, lack of education and mere common sense, indifference, individualism, and idiosyncrasy, as well as, and especially, the blatant, and increasing, social inequality, made worst yet by recent budget cuts to the educational and health sectors, created the conditions for a perfect storm that made Ecuador one of the worst-hit countries worldwide. It is in this context that the Ministry of Education had to suspend all classes, at all levels and in every district of the country, on March 13. In need of financial resources to massively implement distance learning to guarantee the right to education during a pandemic, the Ministry of Education worked within an emergency group activated by UNICEF that established mechanisms of urgent cooperation between Ecuadorian institutions, national organizations, and private companies like Diners Club. One of the premises upon which this “cluster of education” worked was that virtual education, while important, was not enough, since only 45.5% of Ecuadorian households have access to the internet (INEC, 2019, p. 10). Moreover, a study found out that 38% of those children and youth were “distressed,” and indeed that 24% of them declared to be “depressed” (UNICEF, 2020a, p. 8). Of course, teachers were “distressed” and “depressed,” too, and, at least in some cases, they did not have access to the internet at home, either . . . much less the abilities required to teach virtual classes effectively or to deal with the social-emotional questions that the sanitary emergency brought up in almost every Ecuadorian family. Improvisation was at the order of the day, sometimes heroically so (teachers who sent audio files to their students via WhatsApp, or who printed out materials and brought them personally to each student’s home), but an institutional response was needed.