O GUIA QUE ESTAVA FALTANDO! Manualização, sentidos e silenciamentos sobre educação midiática

Abstract

This research investigates the discursive functioning of the designation media education in the Guia da Educação Midiática, a publication of the EducaMídia Program, linked to the Instituto Palavra Aberta. The central problem is to understand how this designation functions discursively in the Guide, considering the conditions of production that shape the discourse, the process of manualization constituting this didactic-media instrument, and the defining statements linked to it in the Guide. The general objective is to analyze the discursive functioning of the designation media education in the Guide. The specific objectives are: to observe the conditions of production of the Guide; to examine the functioning of manualization in the work; and to interrogate the obviousness effects of the definition of media education in the Guide. The analysis draws on the concepts and theoretical framework of Materialist Discourse Analysis developed by Michel Pêcheux and further elaborated by Eni Orlandi. The methodology adopts Verli Petri’s (2002) pendular movement, in which the researcher moves between theory, corpus and archive to construct the theoretical-analytical device. The corpus consists of the Guia da Educação Midiática and materialities related to its conditions of production, such as the websites of the Instituto Palavra Aberta and of the EducaMídia Program. The study also draws on Christian Puech’s (2018) concept of manualization to analyze the Guide as a linguistic instrument that stabilizes and institutionalizes knowledge about media education. The analysis starts from the premise that naming is a political gesture that carves up the real, producing regions of meaning and silencing others, and that to define is a way of seeking to stabilize concepts. The results identify four sites of signification in the Guide, namely: (1) the individualization of responsibility, placing responsibility for acquiring competences to navigate the information ecosystem on the individual; (2) the naturalization of media education as an unquestionable essence, by presenting it as a human right, a basic need and a prerequisite for citizenship; (3) the aversion to schools and to traditional education, positioning media education, in opposition, as more closely connected to the real world and the solution to an outdated school system; and (4) the silencing of ownership and control of the media, of media concentration, of the oligopoly of the platforms and of the public regulation of communication, precisely the themes that would affect those who finance the Guide. We identify a tension between different discursive formations that traverse the designation media education, oscillating between moral-religious, cultural-elitist and liberal-technicist perspectives, the latter being predominant in the Guide under analysis. The analysis shows that the defining statements about media education, as materialized in the Guide through processes of manualization, function as self-legitimation and as stabilization of knowledge aligned with the Brazilian National Common Curricular Base and produced by market agents, conferring on them effects of legitimacy and authority. We conclude that interrogating the meanings circulating around media education constitutes a form of media education itself, insofar as it denaturalizes what presents itself as obvious and makes explicit the power relations inscribed in language.