Use of media and technologies cannot be improvised

The context of social distancing caused by the Covid-19 pandemic has made education accelerate the adoption of digital resources, albeit unevenly and somewhat improvised, due to the emergency situation.

According to a survey carried out by the National Union of Municipal Education Directors (UNDIME), in the first year of the pandemic, 5.5 million Brazilian students had access to school activities difficult. Part of this is certainly due to the restriction of internet access, reported by more than 78% of Brazilian students.

Despite this, the use of media and technologies in the pedagogical practices of the last two years represents a form of resistance from the teaching networks, since without this appropriation –even if improvised–, teaching and learning, in the context of formal education, would not have been possible.

The pandemic has made pedagogical practices even more complex, imposing new modalities, such as hybrid teaching that, despite not being new from a theoretical point of view, quickly became popular, becoming commonplace in the daily lives of students and education professionals.

But that is not why teaching through media and technologies is an urgency in this third decade of the 21st century. Today, digital and media literacy is necessary above all due to the complexities of the connected world, intensified since the late 1990s.

Nowadays, virtual and digital resources are part of a complex communicative ecosystem from which not only senses are disputed and opinion is formed, but mainly new skills are developed, since our relationship with media and digital resources it has been increasingly active, as we appropriate them for self-expression and interpersonal relationships.

Its use in the classroom, however, cannot be intuitive or improvised. It must be an intentional and thoughtful process in order to strengthen teaching and learning. In this sense, it is important to train teachers so that they are able to take advantage of media content and technological resources to bring them closer to the objectives of the curriculum, making classes more meaningful.

Thus, it is necessary to prepare them to perform critical curation of content available in the digital environment, because in the era of superabundance of information, evaluating the relevance and reliability of what is on the internet is a very challenging task. Furthermore, it is important that teachers know the media to encourage students to question the information they consume, to reflect on the purpose of what they produce and disseminate on digital platforms and, at the same time, to legitimize and incorporate the cultural habits of children and adolescents. teenagers, used to creating and sharing messages, especially in leisure time and to “make fun” of friends on social networks.

It is important to remember that the demand for digital and information literacy from educators is foreseen in the National Curricular Common Base (BNCC), a document that guides the elaboration of the curricula of the education networks. The BNCC determines the development of skills related to communication, digital culture, argumentation and scientific, critical and creative thinking in basic education.

In dialogue with this guideline, it is important that media and digital education be understood as a layer, which means integrating it transversally into any discipline or cycle, in addition to reinforcing the intentionality in the use of media in the classroom, guiding teachers to plan a teaching and learning process permeated by investigation habits and expression skills characteristic of the media.

It is in this perspective that EducaMídia, the media education program of Instituto Palavra Aberta, has trained 15,000 educators from 1,128 Brazilian municipalities in all states and the Federal District since 2019 so that they can lead the implementation of media education in their school contexts. In April of this year, a new group of media education multiplier teachers will begin to be formed. To be part of this transformation process, educators can obtain more information and register at www.educamidia.org.br.