Once I heard in a training session that an activity should be ended when it’s at its peak – this should allow for interest to remain high, prompting students to be willing to try the following activities. This I how I say good-bye to ONL 201 and my peers in Group 5: at the height of my interest. So I want to remember each of these people I got used to seeing on Wednesdays in the morning: Viktor, Patrik, Eunice, Alessio, Sakhile and Esther. I grew attached to these individuals as we met to discuss communities of practice, situated learning, identity and emotions. In these encounters, memories were engendered which led to meaningful learning grounded on my whole body. Knowing that memory is fleeing, however, I want to spread some of them through this digital piece of paper.

I want to remember my (rightful) insistence of the relevance of Paulo Freire, who has said that education is political more than 50 years ago. This is a dear memory to me because I did not know how a group composed of almost only European members would react to my suggestion that a voice from the south should be heard at the same volume that the many voices from the north prescribed as reading materials. This had a parallel with my own experience: I was unsure of how my experience would be interpreted by those privileged people. Mark that I am in a privileged position where I live and that I have a hard time making sense of the experiences of people who live harsher realities in comparison to mine. The experience of crossing a border, however, has the potential to reinscribe our race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and social class in very different terms, and I found myself wondering all the time whether I was managing to sell my performance as a teacher, as a gay cis white man and as a Brazilian. I also had to wonder if the skin of my color, which is perspectivized as white in Brazil, would be read as something else in a European-dominated Zoom meeting: was I being read as white, as Brazilian, as latino or was I selling something else?

The concept of selling and buying a performance seems appropriate here, as the economic metaphors invites us to think which ways of being might have more symbolic capital in a transnational setting. I also kept wondering if I was doing justice to Sakhile’s sociodiscursive repertoires and whether I was repeating the same inequalities I feared would befall me upon my South African colleague. I still do not have a definitive answer to that.

What I do have is a reflection on how I exercised power through discourse. I made reference as much as I could to readings I had done in the past, tapped these resources to make my points and refused to be silent. Speaking up in this particular group had a political import because I did have an agenda: I wanted to invite everyone there and myself to reflect on asymmetries and I believe I was able to do that.

It may seem that I’m becoming pessimistic as I move towards the end of this text. I will not deny it; this is actually a reflection of my sadness at ending something good and at the tacit acknowledgement that Group 5 members will lose touch. As communities emerge and disappear with the same speed that a meme goes viral, this group seems bound to disappear with the same speed that coronavirus is sweeping the Brazilian population. I hope I am wrong.

I also know that I’m digressing. But this is OK. I’m sad and I’m hurt and, as Judith Butler (1997) has said, “to be injured by language is to suffer a loss of context”. Of course Butler is talking about name calling and I have not been called names. Perhaps I am at a loss because I will not see be able to call my friends by their names; I will also not be called by my name. We will experience a sort of death; buried from a distance. And we will have to do this mourning from a distance, which is the worst kind of mourning.

Perhaps this is insightful for an approach to distance learning. Emotions can be forged and a legitimate community can be formed, but its stability is way more fragile than a face-to-face course and more fragile than internet communities in general because these communities last. You can return to them and see your friends, but this will not happen with ONL 201. But then, if a successful activity really has to be stopped at its peak, this sounds like an inevitable development. I hope I can always find the courage to do that in my teaching practice.