When Robert Frost wrote the poem The Road Not Taken1 in the beginning of the last century, he must not have imagined that the iconic last stanza calling readers to blaze new trails, travel the less-traveled roads as a way to celebrate breaking paradigms would resonate until today. The COVID-19 pandemic, which reached Brazil in March of 2020, has disrupted the usual models of academic support and therefore posed a number of challenges to language pedagogy (Ross & DiSalvo, 20202). Stakeholders, administrators, teachers and students saw themselves in the midst of an unprecedented crisis that closed down campuses, suspended classes and changed everyone’s (or almost everyone) modus operandi. And, as any event of such colossal magnitude, it called for immediate response of societies, pushing schools from all around the world to rush up contingency plans to face the difficulties posed by the disruption.
It is safe to say that this reality was not different in Brazil. As we enter our 5th month into this pandemic, schools are still discussing the possibility(ies) to return to face-to-face classes and making adaptions to their contingency plans as we watch numbers of COVID-19 victims continue to grow.