Alfabetização em tempos de crise: uma análise sobre a produção acadêmica durante a pandemia de COVID-19

Abstract

This study is linked to the Research Line "Theories of Knowledge and Pedagogical Practices" of the Graduate Program in Education at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Goiás (IFG), and aims to analyze academic production on literacy in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The main objective was to identify what academic research reveals about literacy mediated by digital technologies during Emergency Remote Teaching (ERT) and how teaching practices and public policies were impacted. To this end, a bibliographic research was conducted with a Historical-Dialectical Materialist (HDM) approach, in line with the assumptions of Cultural-Historical Theory (CHT). The bibliographic research focused on the analysis of 67 articles published between 2020 and 2023 in the Revista da Associação Brasileira de Alfabetização (Brazilian Literacy Association Journal – RBA) and in the proceedings of the 5th and 6th Brazilian Literacy Congress (CONBAlf). The analysis revealed that the pandemic not only created new challenges but also deepened pre-existing educational and social inequalities in Brazil. The research highlighted the tension between an instrumental and technicist view of technology and a perspective that understands it as a dialectical mediation for emancipation. The corpus evidenced the precariousness of material resources and the overload of teaching work, concealed under the discourse of "reinvention." Public policies of the period, instead of mitigating, exacerbated structural problems, reinforcing an authoritarian and market-driven literacy logic. It is concluded that literacy, as a whole, is a social and historical process that goes beyond the appropriation of a code, requiring the overcoming of class contradictions, the recognition of teachers’ work, and the use of technologies as mediation for the formation of critical and autonomous subjects.