"Quem me ensinou o inglês que eu ensino?" A influência das tecnologias digitais na constituição da identidade do professor de línguas no século XXI

Abstract

Information and Communication Technologies have been increasingly evident in the contemporary life, thus, influencing and redefining social practices such as teaching and learning (foreign) languages. It is due to the configuration of this new scenario, full of innovations and changing possibilities and, at the same time, so fluctuating and uncertain that the need arises to investigate the foreign language teacher identity in the 21st century. If we take into consideration that digital artifacts are currently quite accessible to Web 2.0 users and that they can be used as pedagogical tools in the processes of searching, constructing and socializing knowledge, then the social roles traditionally played by language teachers and learners will change, either complementing each other or changing from one to another. In this study, based on a qualitative perspective, our main objective is to investigate the identity of the (foreign) language teacher in the 21st century by analyzing the influence of digital technologies on networked learning. In order to do so, we will try to answer the following questions along the study: 1) How does the student learn in the 21st century?; 2) Who is responsible for or somehow contributes to the student learning?; and finally, 3) What is the role of the teacher in relation to the student learning? By analyzing the pedagogical contributions of Open Educational Resources, based on the Connectivism Theory, we conclude that knowledge is the result of different kinds of interaction, which are basically the agent-artifact type, understanding the artifact simply as a tool, or the agent-agent type, understanding the artifact as an actant (SIEMENS, 2004; LATOUR, 2005). Therefore, we understand that our initial hypothesis was confirmed in the sense that the identity of the (foreign) language teacher in the 21st century has been significantly altered mainly due to the numerous possibilities of accessing knowledge as offered by digital artifacts. This change allows us to rethink about the role of teachers in general since we believe that they have not been taking the main role in the current educational scenario and, thus, are not seen any longer as being responsible for the transmission and mediation of knowledge in favor of the learner. Rather, we believe that teachers have been performing a supporting role in the learning process in the sense that they integrate network elements ("nodes"), through which interactions or connections, that are considered essential to the construction and socialization of knowledge, have been developing. Therefore, along this study, we aim to highlight the role of the teacher as coadjuvant, not as protagonist of the teaching process anymore