Semiótica e ensino: ajustamentos sensíveis em gêneros digitais da esfera educacional

Abstract

PEREIRA, D. R. M. Semiotics and teaching: sensitive adjustments of digital genres in educational sphere. Advisor: Norma Discini de Campos. 2013. 277 p. Tese (Doutorado em Linguistica) – Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciencias Humanas, Universidade de Sao Paulo, Sao Paulo, 2013. This thesis is focused on discursive interactions between teachers and students, and of them with some objects – specifically chat and forum digital genres – in a situation of on-line teaching and learning. For this, we selected two sequences of chats and forums: three chats and three forums of the course Games em Education no Second and three chats and three forums of the course Pesquisa Academica na Web, free courses taught entirely on-line, in the first half of 2010, mainly on the Second Life and TelEduc platforms. For the analysis of twelve statements, we used the French or Discursive Semiotics in greimasians bases and in newer developments that open new issues that pervade the whole theory, mostly Sociossemiotics and Tensive Semiotics. Allied to this approach, we employed Bakhtin's postulates (2010) about textual and discursive genres and the study of genre's style, initiated by Discini (2004). Our goal is to understand the mechanisms of meaning production in these practices, as they are linked to sensitive adjustments and contaminate the structure of genres as a whole. From the analysis, we inferred recurrences that point to the style of the genre chat and the style of the genre forum, which still allow, therefore, the identification of more general characteristics that refer to the style of digital genre of the educational sphere. From this study emerged issues which are still unexplored, such as the style of digital genres and categories to their apprehension; modes of teaching and learning that specify digital educational practice; pedagogical-digital life forms; adjustment procedures developed by subjects, among others consistent with our goals. Some findings of this study point to freer conditions of participation in on-line interactions regarding digital genres, especially the spatial flexibility, the interchangeability of conversational roles and, in some cases, the discursive position that refer to social defined roles (teacher/student). With the weakening of the regulatory presence of the school in these interactions, the teacher gains space for every meeting, set up their practice in accordance with their own ways of composing and theme choices and guiding styles that are more suited to students' learning modes. The position of digital genres in an unstable place on the threshold – between speech and writing, between formality of teaching and informality of fun approach, for example – already hints at the profile of the subject that seeks to reframe their pedagogical practice by mixing, which is favored by way of being in the digital environment, thus constituting a space that, while still anchored in the school culture, spreads on the possibilities of new ways of inhabiting the world, as offered by contemporary technologies.