Old teaching practices are barriers to new technological resources
The technologies may be new, but what's the point if the school is the same? And, above all, what is the point if the way in which digital resources are used reinforces the traditional way in which institutions operate? The reflection is in the doctoral thesis “Appropriations of new technologies in the classroom: displacements and persistence”, defended by Davi Faria De Conti at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL) at Unicamp. The research was guided by professors Carmen Zink Bolonhini and Marco Antônio Garcia de Carvalho
Until 2010, Davi worked in a partnership between the University and the federal government to develop multimedia materials available in the Ministry of Education's content repository and aimed at high school teachers and students. After the programs were ready, he realized that being digital made little difference. “There was a concern about not demanding too many computer resources and, in addition, being something familiar to users.”
That was when the researcher wondered about the possibility that educators and researchers were reiterating old teaching practices. “The research started from seeing the other side of this equation, how digital technologies are used in the classroom and what determines the way they occur.”
With visits, observations and interviews with teachers from a dozen public schools, the researcher reached one of the first conclusions of the study: that the school works in a contradictory way, because although there is a consensus that changes are necessary, the same subjects participate maintaining the state of things.
Davi highlights that the school operates in a traditional, content-based way. The teacher has a monopoly on the voice from the basic cycle to high school. “The student has no voice. But, if you ask, everyone agrees that it should be different, advocating active approaches with greater student participation.”
There is no dissenting voice in relation to the mistaken model that prevails in the institution, explains the researcher. “Since the 90s there has been this observation that we are training students who no longer meet the demands of capitalism itself, in other words, it is something that Greeks and Trojans agree on”, he adds.
To try to understand why there are no changes, despite the consensus, Davi turns to the theory of French philosopher Michel Focault. “I use the idea of the 'microphysics of power'. The functioning of the school continues in small segments that are involuntarily repeated by the subjects of education: administrators, teachers and students.”
Davi analyzed the federal government program that distributed tablets to teachers in 2012. At the time, the Minister of Education was Aloizio Mercadante. “In what is offered institutionally there is an infrastructure problem because most schools do not have access to the internet”. Hence the displacements and persistence that the researcher talks about in the title of the thesis. “Students find ways to get around the situation. For example, some students have a 3G or 4G connection and use a cell phone feature that makes the device work as if it were a router, facilitating access to the network for their classmates.”
In other words, the student makes “clandestine” use of it to meet that need, as a way of resisting institutional functioning. For the researcher, the argument used by the institution, that cell phone use is responsible for the student's lack of attention, is flawed. “My generation didn’t have this technology, but they managed to not pay attention in the classroom, they scribbled in their notebooks, exchanged notes. Placing responsibility for the student's lack of attention on the digital device means thinking that the device does more than it actually does in this relationship, which is deeper than just technology”, he points out.
Likewise, teachers look for alternative paths. In the continuing education courses offered to teachers, they have already been taught, for example, how to create a blog. However, teachers noticed a lack of student interaction, contrary to expectations. “From then on, some teachers chose to create pages on social networks, using them in resistance to what is proposed by the institution”.
These appropriations, however, point to another issue, according to the researcher. “These alternatives are not necessarily emancipatory. Teachers and students move in relation to the institution, but this implies a movement of identification with the discursive functioning of the social network and perhaps the role of the school is not to echo what happens, incorporating technologies in use, but to problematize it, work critically on social networks”.
