Educação crítica e novos letramentos: (Re)descobrindo jogos eletrônicos digitais nas aulas de inglês em uma Escola Pública do Espírito Santo

Abstract

Assuming that we live in globalized world, having access to several diverse cultures at the touch of a button, and at the same time witnessing the virtual world’s borders erasure, quite often we have to reconsider the role assigned to the English teacher, dichotomic in a certain way, in teaching a language considered by many as colonizing (MIGNOLO, 2003) and at the same time doing so in a critical mindset in our classrooms. We should consider two scenarios that coexist in our current educational system: The first began mostly after the late 90’s, when what we understood by literacy significantly changed with the emergence of mass distribution of digital system and global electronic networks (LANKSHEAR; KNOBEL, 2011). To this this movement that deals with the importance of all that is digital and the related technologies involved in the students’ literacy process, constitute what is referred to as the New Literacies movement (LANKSHEAR; KNOBEL, 2003). However, in the context of a state public school daily routine few teachers can have the opportunity, structure, and/or the expertise to notice the aforementioned changes. Thus, the New Literacies, inspired by the Critical Pedagogy, critical theories, philosophical language studies and sociology, have added the digital space, new technologies and the internet to our classrooms. In times of computers, tablets and smartphones, we need to encompass, as stated by Snyder (2002), not only forms of printed reading, but also screen based reading, in which the oral, the multimedia and multimodal, and the hyperlinks converge through the internet. Merely teaching a foreign language is not enough and, according to Ferraz (2013, p. 226), we should also be “(...) digitally literate, we should be able to move through the operational, cultural and critical dimensions in relation to the new technologies”. Departing from authors and theories of critical literacy and critical pedagogy, and by focusing on the new literacies theory, the present project aims to problematize the local-global relationship which can be found in foreign language classes in a public state school in Espírito Santo. We used a qualitative action research, in order to problematize the local-global relationships, new digital technologies in a language classroom in Espírito Santo.