From classroom education to remote emergency education: transformations in a dialogical pedagogy proposal

Abstract

This paper presents how a dialogical educational proposal, inspired by Freire’s perspective, was introduced and adapted to the digital educational environment in distance teaching-learning. From Freire’s pedagogy perspective, dialogue is one of the main assumptions for the teaching-learning activity. Therefore, we developed an online environment introducing a dialogical pedagogy, considering students’ problems during the pandemic. Based on this proposition, we created a remote educational environment through the Discord platform. This platform has excellent potential to base an educational environment enabling students and teachers to engage in a dialogical activity. We investigated how the Discord platform contributes to enhancing dialogical pedagogy. Then, we introduced a dialogic activity in an initial training course for physics teachers in a discipline called “Non-Formal Education”. Nineteen students participated in the activity developed throughout the discipline. We gathered data during the classes by recording student interactions on the platform system. The analysis was based on Activity Theory to identify the situations where their agency emerged and changed the activity and what role Discord played in this through the students’ dialogue. The study explores Discord facilities to introduce the dialogical teaching methodology previously developed in the face-to-face format. Finally, we could identify that the students’ voices emerged in the interactions, given the opportunity to express their ideas on their own terms and, fundamentally, be heard and considered by others. At last, students developed agency in the remote school activity, engaging productively in the required tasks and creating a community through the platform.