Docência a distância no ensino da UAB: identidades ambivalentes

Abstract

Modernity has arisen in such a way as if it would dominate the time, through the discovery of instruments to mark the time precisely and producing technologies which brought spaces closer to each other and shortened the time. The space, however, in this historical moment, remained connected to the local reality. The idea of order arises as a path to be followed in all social institutions. It was in this context and with a disciplinary purpose that the school, with its characteristics as we know nowadays arose in its form, as of a location. In this moment, the teacher is the one who bears the knowledge and is also a mediator between the student and the cultural heritage of the ancestors and, in this relation, the teacher already has his/her knowledge legitimized by the institution he/she represents: the school. The passage from these solid relations to the ones called liquid takes place at a moment in which, through information technology and communication, modernity dominates the space. The domination over time and space results into a phenomenon called undocking. The social relation move out from the local contacts and rearrange themselves in other time and spaces. The use of the internet enabled what we call cyberspace and the communication between everyone. It is in this context that we have now, in Brazil, the ―Universidade Aberta do Brasil – Brazil Open University‖, developing a project aimed at moving from local to global, creating opportunities for those who otherwise would not be able to have higher education studies. In order to make this work, it was necessary to break up the teacher activity into three different ones such as: Subject Professor, Distance Tutor and Face-to-face Tutor. Each one of them has well established tasks to be performed. To make the research efficient, enabling us to understand this time and space undocking in the teaching activity, provided by distance teaching, redirecting and building ambivalent teaching identities, sixteen teaching agents have been interviewed through MSN. All these agents work at the EaD/UAB (Distance Teaching/Brazil Open University) from FURG. The online interviews were recorded and, afterwards, separated according to themes in order to be analyzed. The data analysis shows the existence of two ambivalent identities. The first one is identified by the Distance Tutor who more easily moves between the local and the global reality; and the second one, identified as a group activity which is beyond the individual performance of each agent but that depends on the effective work of each one in their own assignments. The experience of this identity is only visible from the perspective of a non-dialectical systemic conception due to the rigidity on the function distribution, therefore limiting the work of the face-to-face tutor. Both identities pursue the same purpose which is to reconstruct the so broken up teacher. They are identities that are experienced in an ambivalent way in a post-modern context in which they are built in the relation between the subjectivity and the context, either be it virtual and/or local.