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In order to reflect about literature teaching in secondary school, it is necessary to consider how culture is produced and perceived in contemporary world because a) culture marks school life the same way it marks all other expressions of life. In other words, culture is the dialectical fruit of those expressions of life: it shapes them and is shaped; b) literature is art beyond its aspect of a content in a school syllabus, it is the artistic expression of the time and place that produced it and, as such, it is in constant dialogue with the culture and place in which it is consumed and resignified.
The necessity of dialogue with digital culture concerning its impact on literature teaching is also due to the understanding of the way one apprehends the aesthetics experiences (fruition) and understands the aesthetics expressions (interpretation), which are products of one’s own culture or belong to other cultures separated by time and space, is intimately connected to the way the culture which one is immersed in is organized and articulated. Education cannot be analyzed in dissonance with the cultural context it is inserted in and to which it prepares the subjects in constant interaction with the sociocultural environment either.
This study aims to understand the perception of public school teachers about the dialogue between the digital culture through its artefacts and the pedagogical practice of literature teaching in high school in order to identify and describe the state of the process of school approximation and assimilation by the digital culture. It is a subproject of the research project “Networks and Digital Culture Educational Observatory” developed by the Research Group “Formation, Technologies, Distance Education and Curriculum” of Bahia State University (ForTEC/Uneb).
This paper focuses on literature teaching approach towards Digital Information and Communication Technology (DICT) through public literature school teachers in Bahia answers to four questions taken from the questionnaire of preliminary information of the first edition of the Course of Educational Technology.2
It is a survey designed to reveal how public school teachers in Bahia State, Brazil, think about using DICT in their pedagogical practice as long as to understand how the digital culture is inserted on their pedagogical practice. This research focused those school teachers who declared themselves to be high school literature teachers, according to the following research question: how does the digital culture, identified through technological devices, present itself on the pedagogical practice of literature school teachers?
DIGITAL CULTURE
The appearance of new behavioral patterns, i. e., the cultural redefinition of the way one deals with the instruments of social interaction as well as the mechanisms of self construction puts pressure on the institutions in order to its reorganization in dialogue with the operative and discursive demands of the subjects in relation to both social and cultural acts. That is to say that “the emergency of digital technologies and the development of new social practices or new ways of mediating social practices already established are determinant to the development of a digital culture”3 (NONATO; SALES, 2019, p. 152, own translation).
Human Sciences have already understood for a long time that “man’s presence on machines is a pepertual invention. The thing that is in the machine is the human reality, it is the fixed and crystalized human gesture inside functional structures”4 (SIMONDON, 1989, p. 12, own translation). They are not merely operative mutations, i. e., changes of the mode of production in Capitalism in a strict sense. This is about a very profound change that is inscribed on the continuum of human history that is marked by the inseparability of technics and technology in the self building of humanity.
Digital culture is used here both as the synthesis of the relationship between culture and Information Technology (IT) (HOFFMANN; FAGUNDES, 2008) and how this movement of production of the existence mediated through DICT (NONATO; SALES, 2019) is forged in the context of the social changes of the “Information Society” announced by Castells (2005). It articulates the idea of culture, according to Williams (2000), as a reunion of all dimensions of social life such as
[...] “the artistic and intellectual activities”, although, due to enfasis on a general system of signification, these activities are defined in a much broader sense in order to include not only arts and traditional way of intellectual production, but also every “significative practice” - from language, arts and philosophy to journalism, fashion and publicity - that constitutes this complex and necessarily extensive field now. (WILLIAMS, 2000, p. 13)
So, to deal with digital culture one has to understand the role digital technologies have on human activities in this time in history. This does not mean that culture as a fully and pure human entreprise is now being invaded by technology: on the contrary, each and every culture has got and supposes a technics and a technology that the human being produces as a condition and consequence of its existence in the world.
Thus, in order to understand the culture in which we live, it is important to highlight that
[...] the contemporary society is a context strongly subject to the mass media rules: it is therefore mediatic, hence the importance of spectacle and image. Literature, considered as a social act, also seems to suffer from the forces of the journalistic field, without forgetting the effects of economic forces.5 (SOARES, 2009, p. 208, own translation)
Thus, the cultural change that Informationalism (CASTELLS, 2005) provides impacts on our life insofar as it creates and recreates the spaces of human interaction and of production of culture. Castells (2002, p. 15) explains that when he states that
[...] new information technologies are transforming the way we produce, consume, manage, live, and die; not by themselves, certainly, but as powerful mediators of the broader set of factors that determines human behavior and social organization.
While avoiding any outburst of technological determinism, this modulation that Castells (2002, 2005) presents correctly marks DICT out - we undfold DICT from the IT approach that Castells (2002) originally indicates, because we consider it to be contained within the plural form the author uses - as a mediator in these process of cultural remodeling due to the emergence of new elements that lead to the reconfiguration of ancestral social and cultural practices as well as the development of new practices consistent with previously inconceivable interactional possibilities. Also, art, that is always sensitive to social and cultural changes, is impacted by Informationalism.
Hereupon, it is also fundamental to highlight that “post modernity - society of spectacle and images - is at least partly defined by the massive transformation of its own category of Beauty into consumer object” (JAMESON, 2004, p. 152). This is essential to the discussion of Literature teaching in digital culture, both due to its condition as art, therefore tributary to the idea of beauty, and due to the emphasis on imagetics as a primordial manifestation of digital culture as an outspread of post modernity, although we do not investigate these categories thoroughly here.
The conflicts imposed by this context to all institutions have necessary implications on schools, because it is an outspread or reflex of the conflicts of the subjects in their dynamics of adaptation to the demands of the new relational and cultural paradigm and of production of demands related to the dynamics of imbrication man/machine and it surpasses a dichotomy of opposition man/machine that could justify any kind of technological determinism.
But DICT strength, rhythm and depth of impact on education is necessarily conditioned by deep asymmetries. Thereby,
[...] we face constant conflicts of power between a young digital culture that is anxious to use and explore the potential of digital technologies and an analogical school culture afraid of the effects and consequences of the spread of these technologies in the school, an educational space that seem to remain disassociated from the Digital Culture in which it is inset.6 (NOGUEIRA; PADILHA, 2014, p. 269, own translation)
Digital Culture imposes the rediscution of the parameters of understanding in relation to culture, reshaping the concepts of real and virtual in order to clarify the comprehension that “all realities are communicated by symbols [thus] [...] each reality is perceived virtually” (CASTELLS, 2005, p. 459). It is always useful to remember Lévy’s admonition (2011, p. 15, own translation) related to virtuality: “in strictly philosophical terms, the virtual is not opposed to the real but to the current: virtuality and actuality are just two ways of being different”.7
But, even if we could not reduce the complexity of the cultural dynamics of the technological devices as aprioristic defining objects of the way in which we produce culture in a specific historical moment, we also cannot minimize them to the point of ceasing to recognize its systemic importance in the constitution of how a culture is formed and forms its subjects. So, it is always convenient to remember that “media are means and, as the name suggests, are merely means, i. e., material support, physical channels in which languages as embodied through which they operate”8 (SANTAELLA, 2003, p. 25, own translation). Considering Digital Culture, it is important to remember that its dynamics is intimately connected to the logic of DICT feedback, because
[...] the characteristics of the current technological revolution is not the centrality of knowledge and information, but the application of knowledge and information in order to produce knowledge and information processing and communication devices in a cumulative cycle of realimentation between innovation and use. (CASTELLS, 2005, p. 69)
On the other hand, it cannot be forgotten that the vertiginous growth of digital culture and its unappealable penetration into school structures and practices does not eliminate the inner contradictions and tensions, according to the dynamics of the modes of production in which they are inserted and from which they are constituted, insofar as “a mode of production is not a ‘total system’ in a threatening sense; it includes a number of counter-forces and new trends within, ‘residual’ forces as well as ‘emerging’ forces, which it has got to try to manage or control [...]” (JAMESON, 2002, p. 402).
In this sense, those people Santaella (2010) calls “euphoric” and “dysphoric” in relation to cyberspace keep trying to turn this attempt of ‘reading’ the reality - interpreting the Zeitgeist - into a kind of autophagic dispute. They have forgotten that cyberculture inner contradictions are no denial of its condition of a contemporary phenomenon, but they are natural deployments of the sociocultural fabric transformation dynamics that moves forward and backward among advances and accommodations, rearrangements and retentions, innovation and ressignification which sets the conditions for the subjects in the social fabric that constitutes them.
Thereby, Castells (2005, p. 456) highlighted that “new electronic media do not diverge from traditional cultures: they absorb them”. This is consistent with the fact that, notwithstanding the perception that “when a new communication technology is introduced, it wages a undeclared war against the existing culture, up to now no cultural era disappeared with the emergence of another one”9 (SANTAELLA, 2010, p. 78, own translation). The ordinary movement of these processes is integration.
But, the singular aspect of the dynamic process that the informational revolution (CASTELLS, 2002) sets up, and which establishes the informational production mode within capitalism or, just like Castells also names it, Informational Capitalism or Informational Mode of Production, is that time and space converge in the dynamics of culture ad reorder themselves in a new flux of time and space management which makes liquid the dimensions of existence that were considered unwavering up to then, according to Bauman (2007). In the last years of the twentieth century, Castells (2002, p. 1) explained this reality quite well: “a technological revolution of historic proportions is transforming the fundamental dimensions of human life: time and space”.
Cyberspace is not a locus in which one lives certain specific and pre established sensorial experiences. It happens in time and mostly in a time characterized by
[...] the frenetism of the amplification of the spaces of influence and hegemony of some ways of comprehension of the reality with its unusual dissemination, that is the virtualization of all possibilities. All of this is an attempt to determine the impossibility of the impossibility. The impossibility is the new undesirable thing that has no time or space to exist.10 (SOUZA, 1998, p. 14-15, own translation)
Step by step, life is carried on both in physical time and space and in cyberspace.11 The realities related to virtual world impact on time and space in which we live. Being-in-the-world expands itself in order to contain the real interactions that dynamically transit from virtual to material space and subvert the notion of time and space in the material world. The material world limitations of time and space are slowly confronted with the new way of operating life in which such limitations do not exist or can be faced otherwise. Thus, cyberculture is the exercise of life in such fluid space between virtual and material forms in which the cyberspace is intrincated with classic time and space perspectives in a further indissociable way, as long as digital culture is related to the ways of dealing with existence with the mediation of digital technology without necessarily diving into the fluidity of cyberspace in order to transact cultural operations on an immaterial support, i. e., it deals with cultural phenomena mediated by digital technologies in this dual relationship between material and virtual worlds. Somehow, one could say that today’s existence happens in this continuum movement of oscillation between virtual and material worlds through the mediation of digital technologies. This reality is present in all departments of life.
Contemporaneity - considering the condition of subjects immersed in the phenomenon due to the complexity of cultural movements and social forces that dispute the hegemony of the reinterpretation made about the project of modernity,12 or due to the impossibility of producing a panoramic and comprehensive view of the contemporary modus vivendi - is not consistent in its effort to produce a totalizing understanding of cyberculture, besides considering that “the world explodes into an infinity of fragments, an infinite multiplicity of senses, in a time tired of promises of eternity” (SOUZA, 1998, p. 13). Cyberspace is the locus in which such tensions of contemporaneity operate and are confronted in all areas of life. Thus, digital culture offers a wider interpretative key that is better suited to explain the way one is producing the existence in the contemporaneity.
Schools are not disconnected from this logic. On the contrary, a school is a specially tense spot in this process of reconfiguration of the way of operating in the contemporaneity concerning to time and space in the digital culture. The school is the time-space of construction of the strategies of action of the subjects in society, both on a cognitive and intellectual approach and on an emotional and relational one. It sets conditions to the society for which it works and is conditioned by the sociocultural environment in which it is placed.
LITERATURE TEACHING
Due to this cultural melting pot that hits language so deeply, the teaching of arts13 has to be carefully considered, especially in relation to “the ways Literature and Arts alike are constituted, dialogue and feedback” (BRASIL, 2018, p. 525). So, due to its singular characteristics of word free artistic expression and canonical corpus with clear standard language regulatory functions, Literature teaching has to dialogue with the cultural forms and the technological tools which shape the cultural environment in which Literature Teaching is inserted and in relation to which the cultural production is directed. Time and space of literary texts and its context have to be reminded in the process of literary text interpretation. If time/space of the production of literary text and its context has to be poignantly reminded during the process of literary text interpretation, time/space in the process of reading reception, by a secondary level student in this case, also needs to be reminded: literary text reception implies a dialogue among unlike contexts.
Literature is understood as an “artistically organized language”14 (BRASIL, 2017, p. 491).15 Literature is a border entity between written language and art. Thus, Literature teaching cannot be separated form the dynamics of culture in relation to the time/space of production and the time/spare of reception. Literature teaching has to imply
[...] the increase in the understanding of digital culture practices and youth cultures through the deepening of the analysis of their practices and circulating cultural productions, [...] repertoire expansion in attention to cultural diversity, in order to embrace various productions and forms of expression - youth literature, peripheral literature, marginal literature, high culture, classical culture, mass culture, media culture, youth culture and so on [...] [beyond] Brazilian literary tradition masterpiece inclusion and the western references - mainly Portuguese Literature.16 (BRASIL, 2017, p. 492, own translation)
That is why it is necessary to think about literature teaching considering the dialogue with the digital culture that comprises the contemporary world and its condition of a temporal, spatial and cultural interconnection, taking into account that
Digital environments are procedural, participatory, spatial and encyclopedic. The first two properties make up most of what when mean by the vaguely used word interactive; the remaining two properties help make digital creations seem as explorable and extensive as the actual world, making up much of what we mean when we say that cyberspace is immersive. (MURRAY, 1997 apud BRUNNER; TALLY, 1999, p. 126)
Thereby, the interfaces which are “border areas of negotiation”17 (SANTAELLA, 2010, p. 92, own translation) present a strain between human and machinic aspects of such interfaces. This strain has a deep impact on Education because it is a culturally conditioned process and, at the same time, a conditioning element of cultural developments. However, in relation to the school as a whole and Literature teaching in particular, the insertion of the cultural dynamics is not supposed to be a mere addition of digital technological devices to the pedagogical practice. DICT “gets into the formative spaces and puts pressure ‘on the establishment, proposing a more critical, dynamic and dialectical curricular ‘movement’”18 (SALES; NONATO, 2019, p. 625, own translation). On the contrary,
[...] ICT use as a pedagogical mediation tool implies a re-reading of the previously defined strategies about teacher/student relations in face to face classrooms. It is not enough to add [ICT] to traditional practices, one has to use them in order to reorganize the pedagogical approaches, to recreate the teaching practice. Traditional and still effective practices must not be ‘disguised’ by the addition of a “new appearance”. However, ICT may and should be instrumental to new approaches, new ways of mediating learning, new ways of teaching.19 (NONATO, 2007, p. 8, own translation)
One should also take into account the tools which teachers and students use and the appropriated digital literacy demanded. First, “new digital media can no longer be regarded simply as a matter of ‘information’ or of ‘technology’” (BUCKINGHAM, 2010, p. 59). The turning point is to understand that it is not about using digital technology in education as an alien element to be integrated to the educational process. Yet, digital technologies are integral part of the daily life dynamics:
The internet, computer games, digital video, mobile phones and other contemporary technologies provide new ways of mediating and representing the world, and of communicating. Outside school, children are engaging with these media, not as technologies but as cultural forms: they are not seeing them primarily as technical tools, but on the contrary as part of their popular culture, and of their everyday lived experience. (BUCKINGHAM, 2010, p. 59)
The idea of digital literacy exceeds the idea of computational literacy, the mere acquisition of operational abilities. It is the development of modes of knowledge production in digital media. In this context, schools must take a humble and learning attitude: rather than telling the students how to use digital technology that is already deeply rooted in their daily life, schools must learn from the student who are subjects of digital culture how those technologies take part of their daily lives producing culture and find out the best way to incorporate such strategies (and develop new ones) into the process of academic knowledge construction.
However, this process has an impact on the curriculum, as long as DICT has an impact on the pedagogical design which has deep interconnection with curriculum (and condition one another) (NONATO; SALES, 2014) in a symbiotic relationship which constitutes the backbone of the knowledge construction process in schools, as Burniske (2002, p. 4, own translation) states: “literacy changes inevitably alter school syllabus”,20 what already is a great deal per se. But one must understand that the implications of digital culture on curriculum are greater and instituting.
Therefore, DICT adoption in pedagogical practice happens as a result of the unfolding of the curriculum premises or come from social practices that go into the school as a by-product of the digital culture that thrives in the social context, as a result of pedagogical practices that, while redefining the methodological design by the insertion of socially referenced mediation possibilities, they internalize social mediation practices and knowledge construction that are already fully disseminated in society in order to guarantee a “contextualized, situated and incorporated teaching and learning approach”21 (SALES, 2013, p. 94, own translation). In any case, DICT penetrate schools with the strength of a preponderant factor in the immanent cultural rationality.
All these things condition the way Education is made, i.e., the methodological design that shapes the curriculum that is actually performed and it directly impacts academic knowledge and curriculum structures, as long as
[...] the relationships between curriculum and methodological design happen inside each ones’ epistemological premises as well as in the open field of the outcomes related to the conceptual references that they establish and imply. If the curriculum architectonics [(SALES, 2013)] depends on the proposed methodological design, the design is only shaped as such as far as the curriculum is able to pragmatically translate the methodological perspectives set by the methodological design, i. e., to become curricular practices.22 (NONATO; SALES, 2014, p. 1937, own translation)
This is not a peaceful process. Tensions between curriculum and pedagogical design emerge, as well as between instituted academic knowledge and emerging social practices that put pressure on the instituted curriculum fissures, between the expected behaviour related to the procedural standard of instituted roles in school and the creative autonomy potentiated by DICT and authorized by a new valuation parameter of social roles of the subjects of curriculum. All these facts establish conditions to the redesign of the curriculum that is actually performed with formal reverberations on the established curriculum.
Literature teaching is especially related to this dynamics. Teaching Literature in schools is already a problematic activity related to the fact that “scientific and technical formation has surpassed the humanistic one”23 (COSSON, 2010, p. 56, own translation). Thus,
Literature teaching was frozen in the literary text supposedly didactical use to teach a grammar approach of the language and whatever would be interesting to the school syllabus. Literary text reading, when it was done, was destined to support the innocuous discussion of themes vaguely inspired by the text and in order to allow the students to fill in standard reading sheets. Literary knowledge was reduced to meaningless lists of authors’ names, dates and characteristics, as well as works and style. The possible relations among the texts were lost in the random and excessive use of fragments or selections which were previously organized by textbooks.24 (COSSON, 2010, p. 57, own translation)
Literature teaching has ‘classical’ problems not directly related to digital culture, such as: definition of canonical texts; the place of contemporary and classical Literature in the syllabus; Literature teaching purpose and its connection to reading formation and language teaching. Beside such candent questions, Literature teaching faces, among other things, the challenge of articulating DICT use with digital screen reading, digital hypertextuality and discursive dispersity as stated by Marcuschi (2005). This new and old problem melting pot is the context of Literature teaching in digital culture, and it implies “fluency in relation to the strategy and tactics that we can use alongside network technology for educational purposes”25 (BURNISKE, 2002, p. 165, own translation).
Just like all and any other pedagogical practice, Literature teaching cannot set itself apart from the cultural context that shapes the curriculum, the social and interactional structures and the goals of the educational process. Thus, digital literacy imposes itself as a condition necessary for the competent articulation of digital culture tools. But it does not exclude the irrevocability of pedagogical literacy as a teaching assumption, considered as “fluency in relation to methods able to be used to teach and learn, as well as critical judgment needed to determine which activities and means are more adequate to a specific group, time and goal”26 (BURNISKE, 2002, p. 165, own translation).
Using digital technologies in Literature teaching brings several things up. But we would like to highlight only one now: intertextuality and DICT hypertext approach naturally brought up by digital devices. In relation to this, it is important to remember that
[...] external intertextuality happens only in the reader’s memory; but internal intertextuality needs a text reference identified as such. In both cases the one who sets intertextuality in motion is always the reader who recognizes the “kinship” between the texts and establishes connections [...].27 (COSSON, 2010, p. 64, own translation)
When intertextuality happens in digital context it has singular outlines, because it potentializes the immanent hypertextuality of the text. Beyond intertextuality that was always a concern in text production,
[...] what is different in digital support is that, besides integrating texts, styles and languages from all kinds of media (oral, written, audiovisual) in a digital basis, it has greatly facilitated text circulation and handling. We can say that digital communication is guided by a triple integration or convergence.28 (OLIVEIRA, 2015, p. 213, own translation)
Hypertextuality and intertextuality operate in parallel spheres and sometimes touch and cross one another. If this is not a problem from practical standpoint, it is a challenge to textual linguistics. Lévy (2011) highlights it when he says that
[...] the text culture, in relation to what it implies in the expression as critical distance in interpretation and closed remissions within the semantic universe of intertextuality is, on the contrary, largely developed in the new communicational space of digital networks.29 (LÉVY, 2011, p. 50, own translation)
The concepts of hypertext and intertext will not be deepened, as well as the conceptual tensions between them, because they are not the mains focus of this essay. Nevertheless, it seems appropriate to indicate that each subject-hyperreader’s singular hypertextual ‘route’30 materialization is a very objective criterion to outline the singularity of the hypertext in this context (NONATO, 2013). Hereupon, the aristotelian concept of potency fits well as basis, insofar as hypertext accomplishes in a concrete hypertextual ‘route’ that potency that is latent in hypertextuality: that is how one constitutes a concrete hypertext (NONATO, 2013). Thereby, in every and any text, but mostly in digital texts,
[...] subjects operate mental remission indiscriminately and stricto sensu digital hypertextual routes according to their volition and intellectual training. Such movements are comparable among themselves as cognitive knowledge construction processes of the text.31 (NONATO, 2013, p. 197, own translation)
So, when one addresses the problem of the use of digital technologies to support Literature teaching, the issue of hypertextuality becomes tangent, among other things, and therefore the way people interact with the literary text.
As from the reign of book and photocopy to the reign of electronic documents, an educator is the one who is willing to cross cultures, from his culture to the student’s, leaving his territory in order to meet the other one, in the face of the desacralization of the book and reading, the devaluation of the power of legitimation that literary culture had for such a long time [...].32 (OUTEIRINHO, 2009, p. 171, own translation)
Thus, Literature teaching, when it is articulated according to the digital culture that permeates contemporary subjects’ thinking and doing, implies much more than digital resource use in the pedagogical process, according to the perspective of a paradigmatic change in pedagogical practice beyond the mere digital inclusion conceived as mere digital device availability and insertion in school life (MORAIS; FAGUNDES, 2011); it implicates the internalization of the way with which the subjects deal with this cultural dynamics in the pedagogical practices in order to make Education into part of the cultural practices in contemporaneity.
Literature teaching and digital culture articulation is part of the dynamics of the embodiment of educational processes in the virtual world (LÉVY, 2007) in which much of teachers’ and students’ actual existence takes place, no matter how immaterially. In this sense, it would be artificial to cut educational experiences off such dynamics that integrates physical and virtual worlds in digital culture in which people produce their existence nowadays in order to build an educational reality preserved from the dynamics cyberculture, because “far from being a subculture of network fanatics, cyberculture expresses a fundamental change in the very essence of culture”33 (LÉVY, 2007, p. 247, own translation).
However, what is at stake in this process is the capacity of the school to open itself to the dynamics of the society in which it exists and to engage in the construction of that society with the very tools that society itself provides. The school cannot lend itself to trap reality. Rather, it must imbue from it to reduce “the incongruity between what contemporary children and young people are and what educational institutions expect of them to be”34 (SIBILIA, 2016, p. 78, own translation).
Literature teaching, although it is at the very heart of “literate culture” project (SIBILIA, 2016) that permeates all school life, has to turn itself into the students’ gateway to Literature World in a broad sense, that means to Literary text fruition per se as a self referenced artistic manifestation, a cultural product that is part of and complements the students’ way of being in the world, in time and space, through arts and those things that only the arts are able to communicate. In this sense, BNCC states that,
[...] so that each experience with Literature - and arts in general - may reach its transforming and humanizing potential, one must promote reading training that not only leads to understand the meaning of the texts, but also makes the students able to enjoy them. A subject who develops preference and choice criteria (about authors, styles, genres) and shares impressions and critics with other readers-enjoyers.35 (BRASIL, 2018, p. 156, own translation)
In this sense, Literature teaching is located between language and feeling, art and technics, instrumentalization and fruition. Paradoxically, such pressures on the world of culture - here represented by Literature - occur alongside misunderstandings which are still existent in relation to the place of technology in contemporary society. While stressing the need of awareness of the place of technics and technology in contemporary society, Simondon (1989, p. 12, own translation) questions how “man can realize in himself the awareness of the technical reality, and introduce it into the culture”.36 With the imbrication of technology and culture in the twentieth century, this paradox exacerbates the problem of how to teach Literature to young students today.
The truth is that if human beings suppose the way they connect themselves to the surrounding world and operate with it through technics and technology that shape themselves together with the other human dimensions, the contemporary human being strengthens this imbrication through the ways of digital culture that permeates all human beings.
So, nothing that is taught in schools makes sense if it discredits the cultural environment in which it is taught and learnt. The challenge in Literature teaching is to articulate itself with digital culture, as it happens to be the challenge of teaching in all areas of knowledge,37 notwithstanding the specificities of each area of knowledge and how each one of them deals with digital culture through the bridges which seem to be most adequate and best suited to potencialize the convergence points of these autonomous cultural dynamical entities.
METHODOLOGY
There is no consolidated tradition of quantitative research in Education in Brazil. On the contrary, there is some prejudice and they are considered technicist and reductionist. The strong French tradition in Education research in Brazil let it to be too inclined to qualitative research, nevertheless “quantitative and qualitative researches are not opposite and antagonic; they are complementary and offer different perspectives”38 (PEREIRA; ORTIGÃO, 2016, p. 71, own translation).
Except in relation to educational performance, there are few quantitative researches in Education in Brazil. Gatti (2004, p. 13, own translation) identifies two typical results related to this behaviour: “or one believes in any data (many times it depends on who cites it - authority argument), or one rejects any data due to ideological reified reasons, a priori”39. This produces a hypertrophy in qualitative research in Education and a difficulty to the statistical consubstantiation of the analysis of educational phenomena.
On the other hand, the systematic refusal of performing quantitative research undermines the education research scientificity, not because qualitative research is less scientific, but because the empirical nature of science (KERLINGER, 1979) is obnubilated by an almost ideological choice of research approach: the empirical data loose primacy in relation to the researcher’s discretionary choice.
Whether qualitative or quantitative, a research is to address a research problem with the methodological approach which is more suitable to the proposed problem, not to the researcher’s personal preferences. The act of choosing discretionarily between qualitative or quantitative research, between this or that research method, compromises objectivity as a cornerstone of scientific research.Thereby,
[...] quantitative researches are indicated in order to answer research questions which are set to unveil the degree or the extent of some aspects of a population, and it is also a way to address social problems. There is a kind of generalizing character in such researches; however, the concern to relate the research to the context enriches the study.40 (PEREIRA; ORTIGÃO, 2016, p. 69, own translation)
In order to verify how school teachers understand ICT use in pedagogical practice, this research proposed a survey, in this case an incidental or instant poll (LAVILLE; DIONNE, 1999; SILVA, 2017), defined as a quantitative exploratory research. Survey é “a systematic method for gathering information from entities for the purpose of constructing quantitative descriptors of the attributes of a larger population of which the entities are members” (GROVES et al., 2009, p. 2). The choice of a survey considered “the strengths and limitations of survey research compared with other research strategies. Surveys are good because they allow collection of data from a larger number of people than is generally possible” (MERTENS, 2015, p. 181).
On the other hand, a Survey41 contributes to open science, “because collecting and measuring data are a permanent source of inquiry and information”42 (SILVA, 2017, p. 138, own translation). Thus, although it does not imply strict replicability, a Survey guarantees the data reassessment under theoretical and methodological premises. Moreover,
[...] survey, as a research method, is relevant to Education due to its sample character. The rigor of research indicates the possibility of generalization from a sample. This is very useful when it is not possible to access the full population. It is important to stress that generalization is not homogenization, or considering that the results represent reality in an absolute and reliable way. No research, no matter its nature, is able to do it.43 (PEREIRA; ORTIGÃO, 2016, p. 79, own translation)
According to Babbie (1999), surveys may be classified as description, explanation and exploitation. This research is an exploitation study.
Accordingly, a 42 question closed digital questionnaire was applied in the registration period to the 31.165 public school teachers who were candidates to the Educational Technology Course of Bahia State University. This course was requirement to professional promotion at the State Public System.
In order to answer the research question, we selected those teachers who said they taught Literature. All teachers had three or more years of experience on Public Schools, because this was a basic requirement to take part in the course.
Depending on how one understands the subjects of this research, it is possible to consider the 802 teachers the full population - if we consider only Literature teachers in public schools in Bahia State - or a population stratum - if you take into consideration the population of Bahia State public school teachers, and literature teachers as a stratum. In any case, 802 public school teachers who said they teach Literature answered the questionnaire. A questionnaire is the most adequate way to measure subjective perspectives with a standardized inquiry (GROVES et al., 2009).
Four questions were selected to this study (from the 42 question questionnaire). The selected questions were related to DICT use in Literature teaching: a) do you think is it important to use technological tools in your pedagogical practice?; b) After knowing the technological devices Bahia’s Secretary of Education and Brazil’s Ministry of Education provide, how such devices are inserted in your practice?; c) Do you consider yourself to be able to include technological resources on your pedagogical practice?; and d) If you have answered ‘yes’ to the previous question, name which resource(s) would you use on your pedagogical practice.
These questions make it possible to deduce the stage of the process of proximity and enculturation of public schools, namely literature secondary teachers, in digital culture which is already fully settled in contemporary society.
RESULTS
The data presented are a representation of the way Bahia State public school Literature teachers comprehend the place of digital culture in the pedagogical practice. Thereby, these data reveal the ‘mind’ of the teacher. This movement that was identified in relation to Literature teachers is a sign of a movement of digital culture introduction in a especially significative group of teachers, because they are the mediators of the process of appropriation of the literary patrimony by the new generations. So, they are the privilegiate agents of the movement of cultural transference, especially the literary one. They may do it with the mediation of digital technologies or they may deepen the gap between the way of being and making culture nowadays and the cultural patrimony built over the centuries.
Thus, the data collected in this research are relevant because: a) this research reached Bahia public school Literature teachers with three or more years of teaching experience at the time of the research; b) the teachers expressed their of the use of DICT in relation to real teaching situations; c) the selection of those who said they teach Literature permits to analyse the situation of that specific group, unveiling their conditioning and the implications of their choices.
The question A (do you think is it important to use technological tools in your pedagogical practice?) supports the understanding that teacher consider it necessary to to articulate digital culture with the pedagogical practice, in the case in relation to Literature teaching. Among 802 teachers investigated, all answered “yes” and 732 said they used technological tools frequently to teach literature, while 70 said they use them only sometimes.
The fact that no one answered “no” indicates that no use of digital technological tools in pedagogical practices is no longer an option for teachers. On the contrary, it is already clear that the digital culture that mediates contemporary social relations has penetrated/must penetrate the pedagogical practice.
On the other hand, all teachers recognized a more or less frequent use of technological tools in their pedagogical practices, among which 91.2% indicated that they use technological devices “frequently” in their pedagogical practices. This is a sign of naturalization of digital technology use in pedagogical practices, at least at the discursive level, but this is a sign of a consolidated symbolic reality, even though the data cannot establish how this is done, i. e., the concrete way in which the insertion of technological devices in Literature classes happen. But one can understand that this is a sign of digital enculturation.
In the next question, (question b), it was asked “how such devices [in reference to digital devices] are inserted in your practice?”. The alternatives were: I) as content; II) as a knowledge production device; III) as support tool for teachers; IV) as a way to facilitate the content teaching and learning process V) No answer. The next table presents a summary of the answers:
TABLE 1 FREQUENCY OF DIGITAL DEVICE USE ON PEDAGOGICAL PRACTICE
| ANSWER I | ANSWER II | ANSWER III | ANSWER IV | ANSWER V | TOTAL | |
| Frequent use | 04 (0,55%) | 62 (8,47%) | 225 (30,74%) | 439 (59,98%) | 02 (0,28%) | 732 |
| Occasional use | 01 (1,43%) | 05 (7,14%) | 23 (32,86%) | 39 (55,71%) | 02 (2,86%) | 70 |
| Total | 05 (0,63%) | 67 (8,3%) | 248 (30,98%) | 478 (60%) | 04 (0,5%) | 802 |
Source: Authors’ elaboration.
The extremely small percentage of answers related to alternative I means that the teachers are already beyond the understanding of IT as a mere content in the syllabus. They understand that digital devices are tools, not content, just like in the other areas of social interaction.
Among the researched teachers, only 0.63% do not consider that technological devices may have pedagogical mediating capabilities. But 98.87% (793 teachers among the total 802) consider technological devices a mediating factor in the pedagogical practice, in the context of digital culture.
The comprehension of technological devices as mediation tools is a strong sign of digital culture enculturation in classrooms, i.e., DICT as digital culture devices are understood as cultural tools used in the pedagogical practice as meditation tools, not as content in the syllabus the students should learn about. This is a symptom that they understand education articulated with social life and inserted in the dynamics of culture, using the existing tools naturally as an expression of the needs, conditions and potentials of this time in history.
TABLE 2 PERCENTAGE OF TEACHERS ABLE TO DICT PEDAGOGICAL USE
| YES | NO | NO RESPONSE | TOTAL | |
| Public A | 715 (97,67%) | 14 (1,91%) | 02 (0,28%) | 732 |
| Public B | 68 (97,15%) | 02 (0,29%) | - | 70 |
| Total | 783 (97,64%) | 16 (2%) | 03 (0,37%) | 802 |
Source: Authors’ elaboration.
Thereby, Table 2 presents the teachers who said “they feel themselves to be able to include technological resources on their pedagogical practice” divided into those who frequently use DICT (Public A) and those who use it occasionally (Public B). Table 3 shows how the subjects answered to which digital devices they used on the pedagogical practice. The strong convergence of the data (97.67% and 97.15% respectively) indicates that teachers feel themselves able to use DICT. This is consistent with the teacher training policies. But it does not indicate a more diverse and dynamic DICT use.
TABLE 3 PERCENTAGE OF DIGITAL DEVICE USE
| DESKTOP | TABLET | DIGITAL BOARD | PROJETOR INTERATIVO | SMARTPHONE | OTHERS | NO USE | TOTAL | |
| Public A | 396 (55,4%) | 92 (12,87%) | 44 (6,16%) | 123 (17,21%) | 33 (4,62%) | 27 (3,78%) | - | 715 |
| Public B | 45 (66,2%) | 03 (4,42%) | 05 (5,89%) | 09 (13,24%) | 04 (5,89%) | 02 (2,95%) | - | 68 |
| Total | 441 (56,34%) | 95 (12,13%) | 49 (6,26%) | 132 (16,86%) | 37 (4,72%) | 29 (3,7%) | - | 783 |
Source: Authors’ elaboration.
Both publics present the desktop as the main device teachers use as digital technology support on their pedagogical practice. It shows that mobility - a key feature of digital culture represented by the prevalent use of mobile technologies - is still not fully acclimatized in school life as even those teachers who said they are able to pedagogical DICT use focus their use on desktop devices. On the other hand, the poor rates that smartphones got - the symbol of digital culture on the twenty-first century due to its versatility, common daily life use and large public acceptance on a variety of different age groups and socioeconomic strata of society - may be presented as a sign of how slowly digital culture is assimilated into school life whilst it shows a teachers’ trend of keeping themselves on cognitive safe zone even in relation to digital culture aspects.
But, the fact that smartphones appear in the list of devices teachers used for pedagogical purposes cannot be under evaluated on its capacity of a sign that the asymmetries of Capitalism are not strong enough to stop the process of technology assimilation at public schools. It is also important to think about a consistent pedagogical use of such technologies. It supposes not only digital device availability policies, but also training for pedagogical use of digital technologies available in the society.
An aspect to be considered in this analysis is the history of teacher training on education technology focused on the desktop computer, as well as computer labs public purchase policies. Another important point is that digital reading devices do not appear in this research among spontaneous devices listed on Table 3 even though the subjects are Literature teachers. One may infer that printed books continue to be the main technological device used. On the other hand, mobile technology availability, especially smartphones, and its common daily use must be considered in this analysis. But all of this cannot fully explain the data. This strong contradiction points out to the need of further research about how such mobile technologies are being used the pedagogical process and which are the implications of such use for learning and teaching, as well as the pedagogical viability of using smartphones as reading devices. Up to now, this remains unclear.
The following table shows how static technologies vis-à-vis mobile technologies are largely prevalent on classrooms among the subjects of this study:
TABLE 4 COMPARISON OF TECHNOLOGICAL MODELS ADOPTED BY THE RESEARCHED SUBJECTS
| STATIC TECHNOLOGIES | MOBILE TECHNOLOGIES | OTHERS | NO USE | TOTAL | |
| A1 | 563 (78,74%) | 125 (17,49%) | 27 (3,78%) | - | 715 |
| A2 | 59 (86,77%) | 07 (10,3%) | 02 (2,95%) | - | 68 |
| Total | 662 (84,55%) | 132 (16,86%) | 29 (3,7%) | - | 783 |
Source: Authors’ elaboration.
The mismatch identified concerning smartphone use in comparison to the way it has become central in common daily life is even more evident when we compare static technologies versus mobile ones. This highlights the necessity of further investigation. Thereby, one may infer that mobile technologies are still not fully accommodated to classrooms and smartphones do not constitute a full classroom pedagogical device yet, mostly regarding literary texts. This is very different from the scenario related to social networks and information access according to way teachers design their pedagogical practice and the digital technology use in this context.
Thus, the data collected demonstrate how the movement of digital enculturation in schools, i. e., the inclusion of digital technologies in school life with the consequent insertion of the school in the digital technology mediated way of being and doing, with its own procedural logic and rationality, that we call digital culture.
When indicating the insertion of DICT in the pedagogical practice of school teachers, the data points out to a school in which the pedagogical practices are more like the life lived which makes it easier to transfer the ways of doing from school life to daily life and vice versa. Nevertheless the data demonstrate the contradictions among which the centrality of static digital technologies is the most relevant, namely desktop computers, as we face the emergence of mobile technologies: it is contrary to the tendency of digital technology use in society. Such contradictions have social, economic and cultural explanations. Yet, they indicate that there is an ongoing process and they set positive signs to the gradual insertion of digital technologies in schools and the insertion of school on digital culture. Otherwise, they point out to the singular characteristics of this process that demand a specific approach in relation to schools and the way that digital culture mixes itself with school culture.
CONCLUSION
Literature is an artistic expression and is in intimate and constant dialogue with the culture in which it was produced and with the culture in which it is consumed. Thus, literature is a bridge and contact point, it is a cultural knot that turns dialogue possible among the cultural expressions that conform the text in its production and reception. In Education, the cultural dimension and its implication on literature teaching is even more important insofar as a school needs to dialogue consistently with the culture in and for which it operates. A school which is incapable of articulating the cultural forces of the subjects by which it is composed has lost all conditions to be a space of mediation of the learning and knowledge construction processes.
Thus, this research about the uses of digital devices in the pedagogical practice of Bahia’s public school literature teachers reveals how this community understands this cultural situation. But, when it is approached as a sign of the insertion of digital culture on school life, it indicates that digital culture cannot be preliminarily dissociated from school life and it imposes the reflection about the implications of digital culture on the pedagogical process and, more strictly, the comprehension of the literary text.
The data collected do not allow to address how the digital culture impacts on the literature teaching stricto sensu: it was not the research question of this study. But the data clearly indicate that literature teachers do not conceive their pedagogical practice only with the support of printed books of classics of literature: the support of digital technologies is part of their pedagogical practice. The data reveal the place that the DICT occupy on the pedagogical process while the subjects reveal the process of enculturation of the DICT: the digital culture penetrates the school life when the subjects of the pedagogical process assume the DICT rationality, manifestation and devices in their practices.
The cultural process that we call digital culture becomes natural in school life as the pedagogical practice incorporates DICT into the school’s daily life, reducing the distance between the life lived in the dynamical connected network society and the microcosm of the classroom.
This research reveals the state of digital enculturation of the pedagogical practice of Literature teachers of Bahia State, but it does not make a qualitative investigation of this practice. It does not address the problems related to the intentions of the pedagogical practices. The option was to measure the insertion of digital culture in schools through the use of digital devices, although it offers a clear parameter and to the respondents and to the scientific community, it is still problematic as long as it does not advance towards the investigation of the rationality inherent to digital culture in pedagogical praxis because the digital device does not guarantee the full dynamism of digital culture.
As we recognize the limits of this research, we would also like to state its strength as a strong indicator that the school is clearly moving towards the diminution or elimination of the distance between school life and daily life that is strongly influenced by digital culture. This is even more important considering that Literature is a subject extremely connected to printed book and bookish culture. That is why the fact that Literature teachers present consistent indicators of digital enculturation indicates a turning trajectory to the school in the twenty-first century, although the asymmetries of Capitalism are also present in the digital culture and gravely impact on the Brazilian public school system.
