Introduction

We live in a time of rapid changes; a “liquid society” (BAUMAN, 2006), in which everything –reference frames, lifestyles, relationships, knowledge, among others – is in flux, in a volatile, unregulated, and flexible way. Immersed in this highly competitive environment, public and private educational institutions constantly search for professionals who can act, in a systemic way, interacting with different teams and sectors of their organizations, to obtain positive results that guarantee their survival and development of their enterprises.

In this context, knowledge gains prominence. We invest less and less in equipment, and in computer systems and programs, and more in the knowledge of the worker, who must seek creativity, use the information properly, share results with their work team; and, above all, be aware that their capital asset is the intellect. This requires a permanent state of alert regarding their skills, as these only represent significant capital when aligned with the changes that reality imposes.

Considering that most institutions in our society are compelled in controlling³ rather than learning, we understand that given the uncertainties and environmental dynamics in which they are inserted, greater individual commitment is necessary. This is in the sense of sharing their knowledge, adapting their personal goals to those of the organization in which they exercise their professional activities, and collaboratively participating in activities as a team, respecting the synergy of the group, to work not only with their mental models but also, with other models and other ways of thinking about a situation.

How to think and act in a scenario, then, in which the Brazilian crisis increases more and more, the unemployment rates, and the people, despite the little education focused on an emancipatory human education/formation, have tried to make do with what they have? In other words, they have sought to adapt quickly, facing problems as opportunities. In this sense, they practice the policy of the necessary, which requires clarity as to what needs to be done to add quality to the educational process.

In facing these challenges, the role of the educational manager is essential to create and maintain an environment that allows innovation, managing relationships, whether economic, social, personal, or political, investing in the development of their team. They should seek sources of knowledge and establishing partnerships “in-and-out” of the school space, given that putting these ideas into practice requires a good deal of boldness, strategic vision, perception of strengths, weaknesses, threats, and opportunities from the external environment, and the ability to deal with risk. In the world of work, there is no room for amateurs!

Just as it requires someone to watch attentively the fireflies before knowing them, watching them dance alive in the middle of the night (even if that night is swept by the city lights), being contemporary requires looking, fixedly, at the time to perceive in it not the lights, but the dark, since all times are obscure for those who experience contemporaneity. However, it is impossible to reflect on it without demarcating a breaking point, in the search for a new look at the relationship between present and past times.

Indeed, that digital networking, which is open to a multiplicity of connections, involves challenges and risks, and requires governments to have a policy that guarantees the right to information and its benefits for individuals, since, more than having a modern communication infrastructure, it becomes necessary to transform information into knowledge, and the latter into concrete learning results.

In this process, how to enable individuals to have their space of freedom and autonomy? What education do we want, and how can the “teaching-learning” process contribute to responding to contemporary challenges?

Supported by ^{Oser and Baeriswyl (2001}), ^{Baeriswyl (2008)}, ^{Padilha et al. (2010)}, ^{Silva (2003}, ²⁰¹⁸⁾, among other cyberculture scholars, the authors reflect on the use of didactic choreographies and pedagogical innovations in Higher Education, for an emancipatory human education/formation.

By bringing the way of living the curriculum and educational practice to the current debate the authors aim, in this article, to re (think) the use of active methodologies in Higher Education. Through pedagogical actions, that privilege shared mediations, with a view to the promotion of communicational assemblages proper to an implicit, intercommunicating, and multidimensional didactic, which contributes to the formation of author and citizen subjects.

Didactic choreographies and pedagogical innovations in higher education

In the digital culture, the emergence of ubiquitous mobility amplifies the debates about teaching work. In addition to the importance of a generalized connection (^{LEMOS, 2019}; ^{CASTELLS, 2016}), communication gains prominence. Communicating is more than ever, sharing meanings. Aware of these changes, and attentive to the low levels of motivation and involvement of students during classes, Higher Education Institutions increasingly adopt pedagogical practices considered “innovative” (^{BACICH; MORAN, 2018}), or “innov-active” (^{FILATRO; CAVALCANTI, 2018}), that is, practices that include, in addition to innovation, different aspects of the “teaching-learning” process, which allow the organization of learning contexts, with a view to meaningful learning.

The authors compare the learning process to a choreography, what they call “teaching choreography”, in which choreographers (teachers) and dancers (students) participate in a dance, on a stage (Virtual Learning Environment - VLE). In this context, they establish a dialog between the pedagogical conceptions and the “teacher-learner” demands, engendering certain didactic situations (dance choreography) so that students, through a sequence of didactic steps, build their knowledge, in a critical, creative way, interactive and collaborative (^{BAERISWYL, 2008}).

These choreographies, which appear as class plan proposals, directing the results of the educational process, are structured on four pillars, according to ^{Oser and Baeriswyl (2001}):

These four levels of teaching choreographies, in addition to bringing visible or invisible components in their core, present two forms of structure:

^{Zabalza (2006}) interprets this same metaphor as “didactic choreography”, both of which are analogous to the idea of ​​choreography in dance; which is corroborated by ^{Paiva and Padilha (2012}), who understand teachers as choreographers who put in didactic situations (acts of curricula / practiced curricula) so that their students learn, in a meaningful and effective way. This implies taking into account their competence in planning these didactic situations, the active role of students in the “teaching-learning” process, as well as the contexts that involve such learning.

Working from this point of view emphasized by ^{Silva (2018}), which requires a more constructivist and interventionist look, directed to learning, which allows society to move from a mass production model to that of production under personalized demand, and, therefore, it generates new possibilities for this learning process. For the author, in these environments, the student can “learn by doing”, in its broadest sense, as they gain the freedom to propose both problems and solutions, and not just follow closed models, in which they are led to find solutions to problems previously defined.

Since learning is a social experience of interaction through language and action, it should provide a community of learning, discourse, and practice, producing senses and meanings. Thus, teaching must be conditioned, and it is up to didactic choreographies to give more clarity to this process. It is necessary, as emphasized by ^{Padilha et al. (2010, p. 8)}, “to discuss the relationship between didactic design and didactic choreographies, considering the contribution of Online Education for reflection and practice on the teaching process”. That means the action of teaching and learning, critically, “inside the classroom”, implies partnerships, exchanges, and collaboration, in addition to shared mediations “teacher-learner” and “learner-learner”.

In effect, the didactic choreographies refer to the “teacher-learner” movements in the “learning-teaching” process, and the didactic design should favor interactivity. “Understood as collaborative participation, bi-directionality and dialogic, in addition to the connection of open webs as links that trace the web of relationships”, as asserts ^{Silva (2003}, p. 62). In this context, it is up to the teacher to act as a learning strategist, a problem maker, a questioner, a team coordinator, path writer, and experience in systematizing, enhancing their pedagogical action, without losing their authorship.

Pedagogical innovation in the context of contemporary didactic choreographies

In addition to fashion trends, marketing gimmicks, or interests of specific groups, we understand that innovation refers to something new. However, not everything new in one context can be considered new in all contexts, given that innovation occurs in a continuum that ranges from incremental to disruptive innovation (^{Moran, 2017}).

Many reasons lead companies and institutions to innovate, such as the search for improving processes and products, and increasing productivity, the concern with the costs of processes, or the possibility of gaining more space in the competitive market.

Among the education trends for 2025, published on Radar do Futuro website (^{TEIXEIRA, 2018}), thanks to technological development, new teaching strategies, and access to knowledge, widely used in leading institutions in the USA, Asia, and Europe and focused on the student, stand out, and they are gradually being introduced, through the association of the conventional curricular model of teaching with more active approaches, or through pedagogical models, disruptive, which alter the design, methodologies and physical spaces.

Considering that both in the work of Jean-Jacques Rosseau, “Emílio ou Da Educação” and in the Ideário da Escola Nova, the student was the protagonist of the learning process, and the teacher had the role of learning facilitator, which is the innovative component of these proposals. What has changed since then, what are the challenges imposed on the educational process and how to respond to them?

The answers to these questions demand considering the speed and intensity of technological advances, in which cyberculture – contemporary culture mediated by a digital network – gains new nuances, reconfiguring social practices and modifying ways of perceiving and apprehending the world. In this context, Online Education (OLE) enables the creation of “do-thought-out” curricula mediated by digital interfaces, with a view to the development of interactive, dialogical, and hypertextual communication practices. However, many educational institutions have been using OLE from an instructional perspective, as if it was an evolution of conventional Distance Education (DE) practices, without taking into account its real potential.

How to “do-thought-out” acts of curricula that interact and integrate digital technologies to our way of living in a network?

In effect, the potentials of Online Education reconfigure the uses that teachers make of Virtual Learning Environments (VLE), seeking in the diversity of their interfaces (Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube, among others) to create different situations for the learning experience playful way, made possible by the plasticity⁴ of digital media. Therefore, they make the way knowledge is woven more flexible through the use of texts, sounds, and static and moving images, which can be altered, created, and shared in a network, in the form of Open Educational Resources (OER).

In this perspective, the formation of teachers for Higher Education must privilege, in addition to technical knowledge, those who consider the complexity and plurality of “practical theoretical” training processes. Besides, they must overcome the didactic vision suggested by the active methodologies, which attribute only to the student the protagonism of the educational process and move towards an implicit⁵, intercommunicative, and multidimensional didactic, which emphasizes the processes of shared mediation, providing teachers with perspectives of analysis that enable them to understand the historical, social, organizational and cultural contexts, in which they are inserted, and its relationship with the knowledge to be (re) learned.

Under this approach, the process of “teaching-learning” comprises three dimensions:

^{Macedo (2010}) asserts that the individual learns contextualized with what happens in the world, as in an awareness of their being. They transform information, events, and knowledge, coming from the economic, social, and cultural context in which they are inserted, in formative experiences, recognizing, still, that in the dialogical relationship with the other, in its multiplicity of situations, the generally unidirectional logic of training can be (trans) subverted and articulated with other knowledge. However, this requires being involved, that is, being on the inner side of the phenomenon's manifestation, being the subject of occurrences, exercising self-criticism, experiencing the cultural context, and interacting with the subjects and their technical objects, their cultural productions, and their ethnic-methods. Personal and collective engagement of the researcher in, and for their scientific praxis, in such a way that the investment resulting from all this is an integral and dynamic part of all knowledge activity (^{BARBIER, 2007}), constantly crossed by the events, without prejudice to the rigor of doing science.

^{D'Ávila (2014}) affirms that pedagogical knowledge, originating from educational sciences and pedagogical science, supports teaching practice and refers to the skills mobilized by teachers to respond to everyday situations, particularly in the classroom, such as the act of planning, managing a class, mediating, interacting, collaborating, evaluating, and redesigning. Didactic knowledge, in turn, contained in pedagogical knowledge, aims to create an environment conducive to meaningful learning, structuring pedagogical practice, and organizing class mediation, which aims to stimulate students' learning, participation, and collaboration, for example, the ability to manage class time; interact verbally; encourage the formation of values; produce student-student and teacher-student integration; manage teamwork, among others.

In a complementary way, in the mediation of the content, all actions are orchestrated by knowledge related to the subject, which favors the process of “learning-teaching”, asserts the author.

For ^{Tardif (2014}), teachers' knowledge is plural. In addition to the knowledge of professional, disciplinary, and curricular training, the author highlights the knowledge of experience, which results from the exercise of the activity itself, being produced by the teachers through the experience of specific situations related to the school space and the relationships established with students and professional colleagues.

In conversation with ^{Oliveira (2007)}, Corinta Geraldi – a scholar in the field of the curriculum with everyday life – argues that, in the training process, in addition to the knowledge that underlies the profession, others are produced in the daily clashes of classes, in dialogue with knowledge and the “things in life”. However, knowledge acquired in professional practice needs to be re-signified through dialogue with pedagogical knowledge, which encompasses them and sustains teaching practice, with a view to a sensitive, playful, and integrating knowledge.

As a place of convergence of the dimensions of being, culture, and power, educational institutions must, therefore, value their professionals, seeking educational alternatives that emphasize critical didactics and reflection on pedagogical practice, transforming themselves into learning organizations in a critical and permanent dialogue with the demands of today; and that implies transforming educational discourse into practice, and this into praxis.

The hybrid model and online education in the context of cyberculture as a research device in action

The association between technology and education proved to be of great relevance for the dynamization of existing pedagogical processes, and to enhance the emergence of new teaching methodologies and practices, revolutionizing the ways of “learning-teaching” and democratizing access to Online Education. In this scenario, innovating, testing, and experimenting have become constant at all levels of human activities, due to the need to learn continuously.

In the search for the best in each device or method applicable to education, the hybrid learning model, also known as blended-learning or b-learning, emerged, which combines pedagogical practices of in-person and online teaching, intending to improve student performance and promoting a more efficient, interesting and personalized education. Despite the problems and challenges brought about by the technologies when incorporated into the pedagogical projects of active and liberating learning, we cannot ignore that the world is connected, hybrid, and active, as well as the process of “teaching-learning”; which requires knowing, monitoring, evaluating and sharing them, in an open, coherent and entrepreneurial way (^{MORAN, 2018}).

As a set of “teaching-learning” actions or curriculum acts mediated by digital interfaces, which enable hypertextual and interactive communication, in ubiquitous mobility, Online Education (OE) gains relevance in the contemporary scenario. However, companies and educational institutions have used the term ‘Online Education’, indiscriminately, and they claim to do Online Education, simply because they use VLE, ​​underestimating their potential. We agree with the line of thinking from ^{Silva (2018}) when there is the emphasis that OE cannot be understood as an evolution of conventional Distance Education practices, as it requires its methodology that inspires profound changes in the transmission model, still so used in our institutions of education.

Based on hypertext, OE allows the individual to exercise their authorship, by operating plural paths and readings, in addition to interactivity, which consists of an act of collaboration, based on the principles of dialogical bi-directionality, collaborative participation, and open web connections, allowing individuals to consume, produce, collaborate and co-create information, emphasizes the author.

In this new modality, the communicational logic is no longer unidirectional, based on the ‘one for all’ model, to privilege cooperation and collaboration processes, in which the weaving of knowledge is made possible by the ‘all for all’ model. In this way, "[...] the message open to manipulation and operability can be recomposed, reorganized, permanently modified under the cross-impact of the subject's interventions and the digital system's algorithms, thus losing the status of transmitted message" (^{SILVA, 2018}, p. 53). Thus, hypertext reveals itself as “the great watershed between mass communication and interactive communication” (^{SILVA, 2018}, p. 18), which, in turn, breaks with linear learning and is based on co-creation through the liberation of the pole of emission, demanding the physical intervention in the message from the subject, as well as transformation and creation, in a dialogical relationship with their peers.

Like the school, the university, and the various educational “time-spaces” meet in a mobile and ubiquitous context, and without underestimating the potentials and limits of different teaching modalities, there is a need to reflect on the digital technologies that integrate our way of living in a network. Also, on how to “do-thought-out” acts of curricula, from which teachers and students exercise processes of interactivity, collaboration, and authorship, made possible by the plasticity of digital, which makes the forms of knowledge more flexible, with the use of texts, videos, and images that can be changed, created and shared on the network.

How, then, to form subjects, actors, and authors in cyberculture, with a view to autonomous and citizen education? How to prepare them so that they can act in future sectors and worlds? What methodologies for “learning-teaching” can favor facing the uncertainties of becoming today?

As already mentioned, two concepts are especially relevant to the learning process, as alternatives to the content-transmission model, widely used in higher education institutions: active learning, which emphasizes the protagonist role of the student, and the blended learning model, that brings with it the idea of ​​flexibility, mixing and sharing.

In line with the demands of the global, connected, and digital scenario, Higher Education institutions adopt active methodologies, with different possibilities of arrangements, with a view to the development of student autonomy and emancipation, through reflection and criticism. Among the premises that support the use of these methodologies, we mention, for example:

Indeed, active methodologies gain prominence, either in scientific circles, when several researchers develop studies to prove their effectiveness or in the classroom, with the adherence of these practices by professors and Higher Education institutions. In these contexts, students and professionals are seen as active subjects, who must take responsibility for their learning (mediated or not by technologies), while reflecting on what they are doing.

However, we observe that the expository class, although not able to meet contemporary needs and demands, is seen as a didactic resource of great effectiveness, given its importance in certain circumstances, such as, for example, describing experiences, synthesizing ideas, or introducing a new subject. Thus, it still prevails in the classroom, surviving all innovations. As a natural evolution of oral exposure, there has been a growing use of dialogued exposure in Higher Education, in which the teacher assumes the role of mediator. Their speech is important to guide the student during the exposure of the content, which develops, dynamically, with the active participation of the students, in a dialogical relationship, which considers their prior knowledge, in a perspective of meaningful learning.

The flipped classroom, a strategy based on the concept of blended learning, allows the student to prepare their studies with the support of video lessons, blogs, games, and/or audio files available on the network, to make the face-to-face debate more qualified, due to its previous reflection on what will be addressed. In this perspective, the classroom is transformed into a dynamic, interactive, and knowledge-filled space, allowing for exercises, group activities, and projects. The teacher assumes the role of teaching conductor, answering questions, deepening the theme, and stimulating debate, from different points of view, to provide the student with broader and more complete learning.

Project-based learning (PBL) is an approach in which students are challenged to develop a project aligned with their personal or professional life. Student-centered, its main characteristic is the collective construction of interdisciplinary knowledge. It is also based on the use of crosscutting themes, enabling the learner to have a holistic view of knowledge and the development of autonomy and critical and creative thinking. The focus of PBL is not exactly on the content, but the skills needed by students in the search for a solution to a problem related to a situation, as close as possible to their reality and professional performance.

Problem-based learning (PBL) is one of the most innovative approaches in contemporary professional and academic training, based on the assumptions of the active school. It aims to develop the multiple skills of the learner by balancing practice and theory. In this way, the student is encouraged to build conceptual, procedural, and attitudinal learning through proposed problems that challenge them to study a particular subject individually and to write down any doubts or difficulties. Discussions about the problems presented, held in groups, take place during classes.

Aligned with the concept of teaching, currently provided for in the National Common Curricular Base, this methodology incorporates the notion of interdisciplinarity, favoring the integration of different areas and the acquisition of knowledge by students, which have meaning in their education. In this context, the production of knowledge and actions occur collectively, with exchanges and interlocutions between the different team members, regardless of their area of ​​training. In this way, problem-solving stimulates different student learning styles, in addition to reading, the use of logical reasoning; increases students' sense of responsibility; and develops critical thinking, the ability to work in teams, and the exchange of information between them.

Games and gamification (use of part of the defining characteristics of games) are, each day, more present in different areas of knowledge and levels of education. With their language of challenges, rewards, competition, and cooperation, they are important strategies of enchantment and encouragement for fast learning and close to real life, in addition to taking the student out of the condition of the spectator and architect of his knowledge.

^{Paiva et al. (2016}) point out, as benefits of active methodologies, in the learning process the exercise of autonomy, teamwork, the integration between theory and practice, the development of a critical view of reality, and the favor of a formative assessment, among others. There is no doubt that, by giving the student the chance to be the protagonist of the educational process, the active methodologies represent an advance concerning the more conservative practices, constructed by the teachers, from the transmission of ready and unquestionable content.

Despite the positive points previously mentioned, in our daily experiences with the use of these methodologies, in the last twenty years, we identified some weaknesses, which result from these uses, such as:

Under this view, we corroborate the thinking of ^{Candau and Moreira (2009}), who emphasizes the need for educational processes to be conceived as historically situated and articulated with other social processes systematically working on “practice-theory-practice” through shared mediation and the use of interactive, intercommunication and multidimensional methodologies, articulating the cognitive, affective, playful, cultural, social, economic and political dimensions of education.

In addition to emphasizing the active role of students in learning, it is essential to integrate teaching with research practice, enabling teachers to 'learn while teaching and researching, and researching and teaching while learning'. This demands appropriate and specific training based on cognitive, existential, pragmatic, and social knowledge. In this context, the variable 'implication' gains strength (^{MACEDO, 2012}), given that the living of experiences of self, hetero, and eco-formation (^{PINEAU, 1988}), in cyberculture, enhances autonomous thinking and the emergence of citizen-authorship. In this light, the teacher becomes responsible for the formation of an individual capable of thinking independently and coherently. It requires them to assume the role of learning mediators, with a view to the weaving of that knowledge in/in educational networks.

As the pedagogical mediation is the foundation of the relations co-constructed by/in the didactic action, this process will only make sense if it promotes learning, through meetings and knowledge production – a collective action sustained in the sharing and interactive collaboration between the subjects participating in these networks. It makes it possible for the fabric of knowledge to constitute a dynamic of co-production and co-authorship, in which there are no leaders, but emergencies (^{BRUNO, 2011}).

It is in this context that the adoption of an implicit, intercommunicative and interactive didactics favors the collaborative construction of an agenda of engagements of the teaching mediation in cyberculture, capable of favoring pedagogical practices that promote specific communicational attitudes, in-person and online classes, as asserts ^{Silva (2018}), surpassing traditional teaching methods that separate the emission poles, such as:

Conclusion

We are facing the challenge of changes that are necessary for Higher Education with a view to its sustainability. The digital network demands openness and flexibility to live with the continuous flow of information, the multiplicity of literacies, cultural diversity, ambiguity, and uncertainty, as they are marks of contemporaneity.

The catalytic force of these changes, their potential and threats to educational practices, and to the curriculum, invite Higher Education institutions to seek solutions, so that the school or university, whose learning processes, in general, dissociated from reality, gain more meaning for today's students, familiar with accessing information and sharing interests, practices, knowledge, and values, without time and space limitations.

In this perspective, the digital network contributes significantly to overcome the prevalence of the content-transmission model, adopted in most Brazilian educational institutions and to mobilize citizen and entrepreneurial education. That is, a democratic, plural, dialogical and collaborative education, focused on not only the construction of knowledge but also, that can build interactive, face-to-face, and online communication through shared mediation.

It is in this context that innovative methodologies invade the market, leveraging trends in blended learning, which is focused on the student, and in which most of the exhibitions and academic content is made available online, being the in-person classroom dedicated to more practical activities. However, a new choreography is imposed on the process of “learning-teaching” to reinvent didactics in response to the challenges of our time, which demand the formation of actors and autonomous citizens, subjects of the construction of a less dogmatic and more supportive world.

A closer look at these methodologies reveals that, at the individual level, the primary responsibility rests with the initiative of each student and what they build in other “time-spaces”, in addition to what the school makes available. On the collaborative or collective level, learning depends a lot on group performance, reflected in the quality of the projects they develop, their power of reflection, and the systematization carried out from the proposed activities.

There is no doubt that these active approaches developed by Higher Education institutions, for the most part, make it possible for students to develop their capacities for reflection based on a dynamic and participatory process, placing them in an active context of their training. However, it must be considered that how the student learns is not an isolated act, in which the teacher, from a didactic choreography, poor or rich, makes methodological decisions. In this sense, it is necessary to be involved with the process of “learning-teaching”, acting as the mediator of mediators. This presupposes, among other aspects, the creation, throughout the educational process, of “worth the practiced ones” curricula, that privilege the integrative, formative, and technological perspectives, so that the weaving of knowledge occurs in partnership with the student, promoting specific engagements of an implied, intercommunicative and multidimensional didactics. In this perspective, neither they nor the students take the lead, given that this centrality is found in the relationships they establish among themselves, and, mainly, with the object of knowledge.