Tecnologias digitais e gestão escolar: mapeamento dos sentidos, tendências, disputas e silenciamentos nas teses brasileiras (2014–2024)

Abstract

This research investigates the meanings attributed to digital technologies applied to school management and the trends, disputes, and silences that emerge from the abstracts of Brazilian doctoral theses produced between 2014 and 2024. The study is situated within the scope of the Research Line State, Policies, and Educational Management of the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal University of Uberlândia. Its objective is to understand how the integration of these technologies into school management has been addressed in academic production, highlighting recurring patterns, gaps, and rationalities that structure the field. To this end, a systematic mapping of doctoral theses is conducted, understood as a procedure for surveying, organizing, and characterizing academic production, guided by the assumptions of state-of-the-art studies. The investigation considers the context of educational public policies and examines, in the selected abstracts, the conceptions of technology that permeate the field, aiming to identify trends, disputes, and silences in how they are applied to school management. The results indicate that the field exhibits an asymmetrical configuration, with a predominance of studies focused on educational management at the macro level and on technologies as instruments of governance, and a limited number of studies directly addressing the relationship between digital technologies and school management. There is a low incidence of investigations on information systems and on the effects of digital platforms on the daily work of school managers. It is concluded that digital technologies operate as arenas of political, ideological, and epistemological dispute within educational policies, reconfiguring administrative practices and decision-making processes as they are linked to specific projects of education, society, and human development, which underscores the need to expand investigations into the sociotechnical materiality of school management.