1 Introduction

The context of the pandemic, which began in December 2019, in part of the world, and in Brazil, in March 2020, aggravated and made explicit an unprecedented crisis condition in our societies.

With the COVID-19 pandemic, the ecological, ethical, aesthetic, political and economic issues that foster the planet and contemporary societies began to receive increased attention, explaining their weaknesses. The vital need caused the integration of new social conditions, health requirements, such as the use of masks, social isolation, hybrid teaching, remote work, increased use of mobile resources, among others, modified the modes of survival, coexistence, communication, as well as the creation and dissemination of knowledge, directly impacting the demands and propositions of knowledge and learning in the field of Human Sciences, in general, and in the field of Education, in particular.

In these conditions, it is evident the importance of resuming the Nietzschean demand for contemporary timeliness, present in the second of the Untimely Considerations:

This consideration is also untimely because I try to understand here, for the first time, something of which the epoch is rightly proud - its historical formation as the prejudice, disruption and deficiency of the epoch - because I even believe that we all suffer from a burning historical fever and at least we should recognize that we suffer from it (^{NIETZSCHE, 2003}, p. 6).

Thinking about actualism is significant and essential, since, in order to infer about contemporaneity, it is necessary “a singular relationship with time itself, which adheres to it and, at the same time, takes distances from it” (^{AGAMBEN, 2009}, p. 59) and, we can say, through dissociations and anachronisms. Being contemporary, living and relating to time, therefore, requires detachment in order to have the acuteness of looking at contemporaneity. Since:

those who coincide very fully with the time, who in all aspects adhere perfectly to it, are not contemporary because, precisely because of this, they cannot see it, they cannot keep their gaze fixed on it (^{AGAMBEN, 2009}, p. 59).

The absence of distance that promotes current events causes errors and strategic contradictions, as we saw during the pandemic. Through government actions, university institutions suffered under a frank political, economic and marketing attack on intellectual capital, a fact that caused the condition to emerge that:

[...] the crisis becomes the cause that explains everything else. For example, the permanent financial crisis is used to explain cuts in social policies (health, education, social security) or the degradation of wages (^{SANTOS, 2020}, p. 5).

However, even in the face of this challenge, universities are striving to keep alive their role as teacher educators and to include, share, and create conditions for teaching and learning (Id., 2005) in a qualitative, emancipatory manner.

However, regarding the processes of teaching and learning in education, we can highlight the following implications caused by the social conditions to which we have been subjected: on one hand, faced with conditions of social isolation, students found themselves in need of appropriating digital and networked technological resources through Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs), platforms, and applications that, for many people, were unknown or difficult to access (considering here technological resources, equipment, and/or networks and connections); on the other hand, universities, managers, and teachers encountered the lack of adequate and necessary professional training for the critical and creative use and appropriation of digital technological resources, including the lack of equipment in institutions and even the impossibility of access to networks and connections (Wi-Fi, internet).

It has become evident, therefore, the increase in social and digital inequalities in society and the formative problem in universities due to the lack of implementation of principles, methodologies, and procedures of teaching specific to open and hybrid online teaching (^{BRUNO, 2021}), which are so necessary for teaching and learning in Cyberculture.

Based on these considerations, we propose the objective of this study/research¹: to understand which discursive practices constitute the teacher and which cyberformation processes² result from contemporary university teaching, fostering the emancipation and critical awareness of the subjects.

It is justifiable to reflect and analyze these aspects when we seek to understand Cyberculture, which is contemporary culture composed of a universal without totalizations and mediated by networked technologies (^{VIEIRA NETO, 2013}), and which expresses the:

[...] Aspiration to build a social bond, which would be based neither on territorial links, nor on institutional relations, nor on power relations, but on the meeting around a center of common interests, on the game, on open processes of collaboration. The appetite for virtual communities finds an ideal of deterritorialized, transversal, free human relationship. Virtual communities are the engines, the actors, the diverse and surprising life of the universal by contact (^{LÉVY, 1999}, p. 130).

However, this contemporary culture has characteristics that have allowed us to look at the subject and, in our case, being a teacher, in their effective relationship with today's technologies, with a little more caution. For in Cyberculture, subjects have become slaves of themselves and have lost their first condition of “being human” due to the perverse logic of positivity, since “the positivity of power is much more efficient than the negativity of duty” (^{HAN, 2017}, p. 25) and overperformance makes the subject sick; surveillance capitalism has been unilaterally claiming “[...] unilaterally the human experience as a free raw material for translation into behavioral data” (^{ZUBOFF, 2020}, p. 18), making the subject a hostage of algorithmic logic and dynamics; and, above all, the social relations of control, typical of the commitment of democratic states in the manufacture of human misery, which does not allow us to have “[...] no safe means to preserve, and especially to reach the becomings, including ourselves” (^{DELEUZE, 1992}, p. 213), to become conscious subjects. These factors impose on subjects competitive cognitive and behavioral pressures that seek purely financial results to the detriment of human relationships with themselves and others that are healthy, conscious and promote contemplative life.

The resulting effect of this human and social condition is that we find ourselves amidst a whirlwind of era changes, where industrial society is transforming into post-industrial society, late capitalism (^{MANDEL, 1982}) is transfiguring into surveillance capitalism (^{ZUBOFF, 2020}), technoculture has begun to cohabit with cyberculture (^{LEMOS, 2008}), and disciplinary impositions are giving way to social relations of control (^{DELEUZE, 1992}) and positive self-subjugation, unleashing what is now being termed, nowadays, as the society of fatigue, "[...] while an active society, [is] gradually unfolding [...] into a society of doping" (^{HAN, 2017}, p. 69) where individuals and their bodies transform into "a performance machine" (Id., p. 70).

Now, in this unstable, ephemeral reality of permanent crisis, what is significant in research is the return of one of the dearest questions to philosophical investigation, which is to try to understand, once again, what “Being” is and how it is constituted in today's eminently cybercultural society.

What we mean by this statement is that the scenario of permanent crisis in which we are inserted imposes itself as the scenario of the permanent crisis of "Being".

In other words, the Question of Being once again becomes the question par excellence of philosophical investigation, which currently presents itself as the crisis of the ontological dimension of the human being. In this sense, the permanent crisis of society and the ontological crisis of the human being have been greatly affecting the subjects and their formative possibilities of being and being in the world, demarcating the condition of permanent change of the forms of subjectivation; of the processes of creation of knowledge and the methods and procedures of meaningful learning; of the conditions of life in society, of cultural and ethnic multiplicities and diversities; of the ethical and moral conditions that regulate life in collectivity; of the reflections, actions and political positions that make us an integral part of human and democratic life on Earth. Therefore, we are facing significant and unprecedented changes, “[...] changes of a deep and structural nature, involving being, knowing, doing and living/coexisting” (^{MORAES, 2008}, p. 17) in the cybercultural social sphere.

In view of this perspective, we glimpse the investigative focus of this doctoral research, since, if in philosophical investigation the question of being raises the crisis of the ontological dimension of the human being, in the same way, in philosophical-scientific investigation we infer that the question of being a teacher raises the reflection of a crisis of the ontological dimension of being a teacher and of the processes of cyberformation.

Thus, in this study/research, we present an analytical clipping through the voices of teachers who give rise to clues that dialogue, tension and present limits to the understanding of the issue of being a teacher and the processes of Cyberformation in contemporary universities, through the intersection of the data produced in the field research, in progress, with the theoretical framework of the research, as we will point out below.

2. Methodology

Understanding how we become what we are is an expensive ontological question and a powerful genealogical problematization raised in modernity and questioned with the Nietzschean question of: how to become what you are? It was in 1888, in "Ecce Homo," that the philosopher indicated this pressing need and wove his genealogical analysis of how he became what he is: "foreseeing that soon I must distinguish myself to humanity with the most serious demand ever placed upon it, it seems indispensable to me to say who I am" (^{NIETZSCHE, 1995}, p. 17).

This problem allowed us to draw the object of this philosophical-scientific investigation, since the Nietzschean question has a direct relationship with the Foucauldian problematization of the subjectivation modes of the subject that is constituted by recognizing the actual events of history. Since:

Continuous history is the indispensable correlate to the founding function of the subject: the guarantee that everything that has escaped him can be returned; the certainty that time will not disperse anything without reconstituting it in a recomposed unit; the promise that the subject can one day - in the form of historical consciousness - appropriate, again, all these things kept at a distance by difference, restore his dominion over them and find what can be called his abode. (^{FOUCAULT, 2008}, p. 14).

Therefore, this qualitative research seeks the origin (Herkunft), the provenance of the historical events of being a teacher, creating an ontology of the present, a critical quest for understanding ourselves and, in our case, being a teacher, which, through its discursive practices, will allow us to find paths to understand processes of cyberformation in university teaching that promote the emancipation and critical consciousness of individuals.

It was possible to carry out a rigorous analysis of the data produced in the field because we opted for the multi-referential approach as a methodological approach, with perspectives of plural and contradictory readings (^{ARDOINO, 2005}), integrated into the methodology of the conversation, whose approximation and mobilization of the relationships experienced by the participants imply a dialogical political act with and not for and about them (^{RIBEIRO; SOUZA; SAMPAIO, 2018}), and the Foucauldian archaeogenealogical methodology, which allows:

[...] a complex bundle of relations that function as a rule: [that] prescribes what must be correlated in a discursive practice, so that it refers to such and such an object, so that it uses such and such an enunciation, so that it uses such a concept, so that it organizes such and such a strategy (^{FOUCAULT, 2008}, p. 86).

An analysis of discursive practices was conducted in online conversations with 29 (twenty-nine) participants of the research, here understood as Qualified Informants (IQ), teachers in higher education teaching degree courses from universities across 4 (four) continents (America, Africa, Europe, and Asia), engaging in dialogues in the languages Portuguese, English, Spanish, and French, as can be observed in Figure 1.

Source: Prepared by the authors

Figure 1 Field research map. 

Recruitment was conducted respecting 3 (three) stages of nomination: (a) participants indicated (PI) by Brazilian university professors; (b) PI by the professors from the first stage; (c) PI by the professors from the second stage, totaling 29 (twenty-nine) online conversations - Brazil (6), Colombia (4), Chile (1), Uruguay (1), Ecuador (1), Mexico (1), United States (4), Portugal (3), Spain (2), Africa (5), Asia (1). All met the following criteria: (a) teacher in undergraduate courses; (b) innovative pedagogical practice (according to their peers); (c) that meets the principles of contemporary pedagogies and contextualized with current training needs, in interface with cyberculture. The IQs were contacted via phone, WhatsApp and/or Messenger and also via email and received all information regarding their participation in the research (Official Invitation and ICF - Term of Free and Informed Consent).

The online conversations were conducted using the Google Meet platform through the Research Field Instrument, containing 16 (sixteen) conversation-triggering elements, resulting in a full recording of the conversation. The field produced clues and different meanings about the training processes experienced/experienced by IQ. This text presents an excerpt from the research in progress.

3. Results and Discussion

We present an initial analytical approach through online conversations with seven (7) IQ in Portuguese, Spanish and English, making it possible to create a textual corpus of analysis using the free qualitative analysis software IRAMUTEQ (Interface de R pour les Analyses Multidimensionnelles de Textes et de Questionnaires).

For the systematic analysis of online conversations, we based our analysis on the following criteria, as can be observed in Figure 2:

Source: Prepared by the authors (2023).

Figure 2 Criteria for analyzing online conversations. 

The objective, in this sample, was to extract from the systematic analysis of online conversations 01 (one) enunciative unit of the teaching discourse with the highest co-occurrence in the excerpts of online conversations, allowing for the analysis of the teaching discourse and the interrelation of what was said by the IQ with the theoretical framework of the research.

Initially, the statistical analysis performed by IRAMUTEQ, composed of the texts of the 07 (seven) IQ, generated the following variables:

Source: Data synthesis (2023).

Figure 3 Command line and variables in the textual corpus of analysis. 

The second stage of analysis, using the Hierarchical Descendant Classification (HDC) method, allowed us to categorize 3 (three) Categorical Units of Analysis - UCA: Class 1: Intersubjectivity; Class 2: Virtuality; Class 3: Cyberformacivity. In Class 1, object of the analytical clipping presented in this article, we obtained 58 (fifty-eight) co-occurrences of the word “teacher”, as shown in figure 4.

Source: Data synthesis (2023).

Figure 4 Occurrence of words by classes found in the HDC analysis and prevalence, in Class 1 - Intersubjectivity, of the word "professor", with 58 occurrences. 

In the third stage, we performed the Similitude Analysis with 3 (three) blocks of co-occurrences per enunciative units of the teaching discourse, as shown in figure 5:

Source: Data synthesis (2023).

Figure 5 Analysis Similarity and co-occurrence between words. 

The Similitude Analysis produced Class 1 - Intersubjectivity (in the graph, orange halo); Class 2 - Virtuality (in the graph, dark blue halo); and Class 3 - Cyberformacivity (in the graph, pink halo). The flow of tree rooting present in figure 5 demonstrates that Class 1 is the main class and the ramifications of Classes 2 and 3 result from it and that the co-occurrence of words in Class 1 has the root word “student” with 74 (seventy-four) occurrences, but is followed by the word “teacher”, with 58 (fifty-eight) occurrences, being, for this analytical cutout, the main word or enunciative unit of the teaching discourse.

Thus, we delimit the enunciative unit of the teacher discourse as a constitutive part of the teacher discursive formation, as will be presented below.

4 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS

We know that other singularities will be present in the enunciation of teaching discourses, allowing us to identify elements such as criticality, dialogicity, connectivity, interactivity and creativity, characteristics that emerge in contemporary university teaching.

For now, we tried to demonstrate how the things said by / the IQ create clues about the constitution of the being a teacher and what cyberformation processes result from their praxis in today's world, notably cybercultural.

Although in an embryonic way, we start from the premise that it is necessary that, in contemporary universities and in teacher training environments, discursive practices and teaching actions promote cyberformation processes that awaken transformative, transgressive digital thoughts and practices, accompanied by critical technological awareness and ethical, political and aesthetic notions that allow the subjects involved to free themselves and become autonomous to live the potential of Cyberculture. It is necessary for university teaching to overcome the conditions of formation and subjectivation arising from banking education (^{FREIRE, 2019}) and implemented by technobanking (a neologism that expresses the entire model of education that uses digital technologies in an instrumental way and does not provide the emancipatory formation of the subjects).

We have to learn to “be more” (^{FREIRE, 2019}), the result of cyberformation processes of an “authentic praxis” (Id., 2019), engaged pedagogies (^{HOOKS, 2013}) and open teaching (^{BRUNO, 2021}) in the formative environments and teaching practices in contemporary universities, which promote autonomy, awareness and emancipation of being a teacher and subjects for effective and contemplative life in cyberculture.

The road ahead can be long and arduous, but certainly thought-provoking and revealing.