Letramentos digitais e letramento racial crítico: uma análise dos materiais didáticos de língua inglesa do aplicativo “Estude em casa”

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a state of public health emergency, leading the State Department of Education, Sports, and Culture (SEDUC) of Sergipe to provide digital educational materials through the "Estude em Casa'' (Study at Home) app, aiming to support the educational community during the period of emergency remote teaching. This modality of education, which emerged as a necessary emergency measure to address immediate educational demands, seeking to minimize the negative impacts resulting from school closures, has raised questions in society about its effectiveness. Whereas for this research, the inquiry focused on the potential of the app to enable practices of new literacies (LANKSHEAR; KNOBEL; CURRAN, 2013; KNOBEL; LANKSHEAR, 2014; LANKSHEAR; KNOBEL, 2018), with emphasis on the analysis of digital literacies (JONES; HAFNER, 2012; TAKAKI; SANTANA, 2014; SULZER, 2018; NASCIMENTO; KNOBEL, 2017) and critical racial literacy (LADSON BILLINGS, 1998; FERREIRA, 2014; NASCIMENTO, 2016; BRASIL, 2018). Situated within the field of Applied Linguistics, which seeks inter/trans/INdisciplinarity (ROTH; SELBACH; FLORÊNCIO, 2016) and understands that social problems transcends language teaching and language studies boundaries, this research is enriched with contributions from feminist, race, gender, and social class studies, analyzing intersections between these areas (CRENSHAW, 2004; AKOTIRENE, 2019; DAVIS, 2016; KILOMBA, 2019; FERREIRA, 2019) and the language studies field. Within this scope, this bibliographic, document, and interpretative research (PAIVA, 2019; MOITA LOPES, 1994; SALDAÑA, 2009) aims to analyze how the digital educational materials available on the "Estude em Casa'' app address and/or enable the development of digital literacies and critical racial literacy in English teaching. For data collection and analysis, the bibliographic research involved texts related to the topics of study; the document analysis covered the digital educational materials for English language teaching provided by SEDUC and assembled [COMPILED]in the "Estude em Casa'' app; and the data interpretation also included recording observations and reflections in a field diary. The results indicate a superficial approach to digital literacies and critical racial literacy in the digital educational materials, as the opportunities for developing these literacies depend directly on the teacher's intervention, which connects to their teacher education. In this sense, the research findings highlight the need for restructuring in teacher education courses to integrate these discussions. At last, through this research, I hope to contribute to advancing investigations in new literacies, specifically regarding digital literacies and critical racial literacy.