Digital inclusion of youth and adults and popular education

analytical fragments of experiences in the Circle of Digital Culture

Abstract

he article analyzes the development of the Digital Culture Circle, experience of popular education with youth and adults which intends to promote the digital inclusion of these subjects. The project titled “Digital Inclusion in Popular Education of young/adults and Teachers Training”, constructed in the partnership established between educators from the State University of Santa Catarina and the Canto da Ilha School of Tourism and Hotel Management. This proposal intends to (re)think the meanings of digital inclusion to work towards a critical-problematic appropriation of Information and Communication Technologies. The methodology adopted in the Digital Culture Circle is anchored in the foundations of Freire-based popular education, constituting itself as a formative space-time, of a virtual-presential nature, in which the socialization of experiences and collective construction of knowledge occurs by authorship and collaboration in the digital culture. Results indicate that the education developed in the Circle can constitute an experience of critical and creative appropriation/objectification of ICTs by working class’ young and adults. In synthesis, a formative potential is identified to advance beyond the instrumental perspectives of digital inclusion, which are based on the neutral and a-historical learning of the operational dimensions of these technologies, used mainly from fetishized and individualistic goals.