Digital technologies and teaching: what did we already know before experiencing the remote emergency period of 2020/2021?

Abstract

Remote emergency teaching, during the COVID-19 pandemic, with the mandatory use of digital technologies, was full of unpredictability for education around the world. From the experience in that period, a question arose: how did Portuguese language teachers in the interior of Ceará use digital technologies in their practice before remote teaching? For this work, the aim of this study is to: understand the relationships of high school Portuguese language teachers with digital technologies in their teaching practice prior to the remote period. As theoretical foundations, there is a dialogue with studies on the impact of TDICs on language (BARTON; LEE, 2015); multiliteracies at school, fruits of the digital era (ROJO; BARBOSA, 2015); computer-mediated teaching (LEVY, 1999), and notions of paradigms (VASCONCELLOS, 2002; MORIN, 2015). The corpus consisted of nine interviews with Portuguese language teachers from the 17th Regional Coordination for Education Development, located in the interior of Ceará, from which the data analyzed in this work was extracted. As a result, it was observed that most of the participating teachers still used digital technologies in classes in a traditional way and did not consider themselves competent users of them before encountering remote teaching.