Workshop: Digital Literacies and Digital Inclusion in Contemporary Brazil

In the digital turn, when knowledge is considered ubiquitous (COPE; KALANTZIS, 2009) and learning outside of school is permanent, what knowledge can formal education offer? Despite the presence of the digital infrastructure for more than three decades, educational institutions find themselves unprepared and outdated to resume teaching on digital learning environments during the social isolation caused by the COVID pandemic. Moreover, neoliberilism in pandemic times has narrowed down our choices, with social media such as WhatsApp groups being used for educational reasons and digital platforms such as G Suite (which includes Google Classroom) and Microsoft Teams leading the market. There is no doubt that the pandemic enhanced the digital divide in Brazil with many of the public-school students and teachers lacking the necessary access to the infrastructure of computers and high-speed Internet or not having acquired the basic digital literacy (TAGATA; RIBAS, 2021) that remote teaching demands. After all, access to technology in the educational context “is just a small part of a much more complex problem” (JUNQUEIRA; BUZATO, 2013, p. 3), thus the need to discuss social together with digital inclusion. Based on the qualification, socialization and subjectification theory (BIESTA, 2020) on the purposes of education, we suggest decolonial qualification, rhizomatic socialization and qualified subjectification (MIZAN; SILVA, in press) in order to fight scientific negationism (LOPES, 2021) and misinformation together with AI algorithm manipulation in the information societies. We propose the CGScholar educational digital environment since it enhances dialogical, interactive, participatory and collaborative possibilities, which seek to bring daily lay practices of using the digital to the area of education, while developing practices of active citizenship.