Discursos sobre a educação na implementação do Ensino Remoto Emergencial no IFTM durante a pandemia de Covid-19

Abstract

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, with the need for physical distancing and the authorization of the implementation of non-face-to-face teaching activities, a debate began on how to make these non-face-to-face activities viable – which was called Emergency Remote Teaching (ERE). Without disregarding the technical complexities in the implementation of ERE, we understand that it is necessary to first be clear about which discourses on education guided this implementation. This research is justified by the need to investigate the discourses that guided the implementation of ERE in a public educational institution, since this can help us draw an overview of the objectives and priorities of education in times of crisis, which serves both to evaluate the actions taken during the coronavirus crisis and for future exceptional contexts (of a health crisis or war, for example). In this sense, we proposed to investigate whether the discourses on education that guided the implementation of the ERE are part of a technocratic perspective or one that prioritizes the comprehensive education of students. As the investigative locus, we selected the Federal Institute of Triângulo Mineiro (IFTM), which implemented remote teaching in March 2020. In order to investigate the discourses on education that guided the implementation of the ERE, we mapped official documents that made such implementation possible in order to enable the analysis of the corpus formed by: a) normative instructions produced by the IFTM that directed the actions on the different campuses of the institution; b) testimonies of managers and teachers of the IFTM Ituiutaba campus. We understand that this issue is scientifically relevant in the area of linguistic studies, since one of the objectives of research in Applied Linguistics, according to Moita Lopes (2006, p. 14), is to “create intelligibility about a social problem in which language plays a central role”. It is in this sense that we will approach the adoption of ERE – a social issue – based on the assumption that the way in which managers and teachers discursively signify the implementation of ERE has direct implications on how this process is carried out. We seek to answer the following research questions: what discourses on education guided the implementation of ERE? How do these discourses materialize in the professional performance of managers and teachers involved in this process? To answer these questions, we analyzed our corpus adopting a discursive perspective of language, investigating its relationship with history, ideology and the processes of production of meanings, in an interface between Franco-Brazilian Discourse Analysis, especially based on the theoretical constructs of Michel Pêcheux (1993, 1997, 2015), and Applied Linguistics (AL), in a transdisciplinary approach, as defended by Pennycook (2006), keeping in mind the social relevance of the work we proposed to carry out. By comparing institutional documents and the statements of employees, it was possible to perceive that the implementation of ERE at IFTM is inscribed in a contradiction between two major discourses: the discourse of control and the discourse of guaranteeing education for all.