Freire’s “Pedagogy of Autonomy” and Castells “Mass Self-Communication” in the strengthening of protagonism of student in hybrid education in times of pandemic

Abstract

This article seeks to extract contributions from the concepts of “Autonomy” by Paulo Freire and “Mass Self-Communication” by Manuel Castells to help understand the processes of strengthening student protagonism in times of hybridism in education. As a methodology, we opted for a qualitative approach, applying the technique of bibliographic research, in order to analyze the literature of the above concepts, within the current context of Covid-19. Among the results of the research, in addition to consolidating the principle of student protagonism as the “central pillar” for the success of hybrid education, there was an urgent need to initially literate and make the student aware of digital citizenship and, at the same time, align the current university pedagogical paradigms to the new student profile of the digital age.

Keywords
Autonomy; Mass Self-Communication; Student Protagonism; Hybrid Education

Resumo

Este artigo busca extrair as contribuições dos conceitos de “Autonomia” de Paulo Freire e de “Autocomunicação de Massa” de Manuel Castells para ajudar na compreensão dos processos de fortalecimento do protagonismo estudantil em tempos de hibridismo na educação. Como metodologia, optou-se por uma abordagem qualitativa, aplicando a técnica de pesquisa bibliográfica, a fim de analisar a literatura dos conceitos supracitados dentro do atual contexto de Covid-19. Entre os resultados da pesquisa, além de consolidar o princípio do protagonismo estudantil como o “pilar central” para o êxito da educação híbrida, evidenciou-se a urgente necessidade de, inicialmente, alfabetizar e conscientizar o estudante à cidadania digital e, concomitantemente, alinhar os atuais paradigmas pedagógicos universitários ao novo perfil do estudante da era digital.

Palavras-chave
Autonomia; Autocomunicação de Massa; Protagonismo Estudantil; Educação Híbrida

Resumen

Este artículo busca extraer aportes de los conceptos de “Autonomía” de Paulo Freire y “Autocomunicación de Masas” de Manuel Castells para ayudar en la comprensión de los procesos de fortalecimiento del protagonismo estudiantil en tiempos de hibridismo en la educación. Como metodología se optó por un abordaje cualitativo, aplicando la técnica de la investigación bibliográfica, con el fin de analizar la literatura de los conceptos antes mencionados, en el contexto actual del Covid-19. Entre los resultados de la investigación, además de consolidar el principio de protagonismo estudiantil como el “pilar central” para el éxito de la educación híbrida, se ha evidenciado una urgente necesidad de alfabetizar inicialmente y sensibilizar a los estudiantes sobre la ciudadanía digital y, al mismo tiempo, alinear los paradigmas pedagógicos universitarios actuales al nuevo perfil estudiantil de la era digital.

Palabras clave
Autonomía; Autocomunicación de Masas; Protagonismo Estudiantil; Educación Híbrida

Introduction

Protagonism, autonomy and personalization¹ are expressions that occupy a central place in research and in the communicative “act” of the individual immersed in the ecosystem of “Mass Self-Communication”, practiced by billions of users in personalized digital media. Thus, Castells (2013, p. 15) introduces: “In the last few years, the fundamental change in the field of communication has been the emergence of what I have called mass self-communication - the use of the internet and wireless networks as platforms for digital communication”.

Specifically in the field of Education, thanks to the progressive popularization of communicational and informational autonomy in digital media, we participate, directly or indirectly, in the culture of ubiquitous learning (u-learning), learning via mobile devices (m-learning), learning via electronic media in general (e-learning), the culture of Massive Open On-line Courses (MOOCs), in short, the culture of Digital Learning Platforms.

These diverse formats of on-line teaching-learning have been slowly consolidating in the last decades, however, with the pandemic of Covid-19², throughout the year 2020, they became a lifeline for all educational institutions that adopted the modality of Emergency Remote Teaching.

If in 2020 we were forced to social distance, which imposed full Remote Education on everyone, from 2021 onwards, “hybrid teaching” gradually gains the hearts of teachers, as well as researchers who investigate this phenomenon. However, living immersed in the culture of accessibility, when everything is just a click away, thus diluting the walls of schools and universities that separated the student from access to knowledge, more than talking about “hybrid teaching”, it makes sense to choose the expression “hybrid education”, as it contemplates both formal and informal hybrid teaching and learning. With the pandemic, we realized the urgency to re-signify or reinvent not only the “teaching” modality, but the complex educational system, highlighted in this article to higher education.

If, on the one hand, Covid-19 brought pain, loss, personal and social disruption, isolation and crises of various kinds all over the planet, on the other hand it caused a great revolution for all institutions of presential education. The pandemic has led billions of people to a deeper reflection on “being” and “acting” in all work environments, among them, in the field of Education.

Specifically, in educational institutions, the new coronavirus has prohibited teachers from teaching in classrooms. In this context, in a very short time, each educator assumed the condition of protagonist and transformer of his own pedagogical activity, abruptly exchanging the face-to-face with remote teaching, in order to continue responding to the demands of the student in times of pandemic.

By living immersed in digital media ecologies and empowering them to live and do almost everything, students and educators took digital media from the periphery of the academic space and placed them as locomotives of the teaching-learning process. The feeling was one of strangeness on the part of some, of rejection on the part of others and of appropriation on the part of many. The internet, with all its contradictions - of exclusion, low speed and low digital literacy - is being the main environment where the process of hybridization of education takes place.

The hybrid or the hybridization are not exclusive properties of the field of Education, but socio-cultural processes in which practices or structures faced with new contexts, challenges or problems combine and recombine to produce new objects, practices and structures, generating losses and gains (GARCÍA CANCLINI, 2003). In this way, would education not be the fusion of several possible combinations of learning, in view of the emancipation and the process of improvement of the human being? One of the answers comes from Moran (2015, p. 27): “Education has always been hybrid, it has always combined various spaces, times, activities, methodologies, audiences. This process now, with mobility and connectivity, is much more noticeable, broad and deep: it is a more open and creative ecosystem”. In other words, hybrid education is the combination of methodologies, spaces, on-line and off-line educational media ecosystems, with the purpose of presenting the best learning alternatives for students.

Therefore, within this context of hybrid education in times of pandemic, our objective is to describe the contributions of the concepts of “Autonomy” by Freire and of digital “Mass Self-Communication” by Castells, in their complementarity, to understand the processes of strengthening student protagonism in hybrid higher education.

Methodologically, we opted for a qualitative approach, applying the technique of bibliographic research, in order to extract from the two concepts mentioned above, theoretical and propositional foundations that corroborate with the strengthening of the protagonism of the university student, who, conditioned by the current context of Covid-19, was abruptly inserted into the remote/hybrid mode, on life.³

In qualitative research, one must ask: “To what extent do your discoveries increase the understanding of the phenomenon studied? To what extent do your findings corroborate the body of existing knowledge? That is, do they support, confirm or refute what is already known about the phenomenon?” (BLOOMBERG; VOLPE, 2016, p. 273). Therefore, following this methodological thread, we ask ourselves: to what extent the discoveries made in the bibliographic research on the concepts of “Autonomy” by Freire and digital “Self-Communication” by Castells can help in reflecting about the university student protagonism, inserted in the current phenomenon of hybrid education?

Complementarity between Freire’s “Pedagogy of Autonomy” and Castells’ “Mass Self-Communication”

When it is said that Freire and Castells complement each other, it is said, therefore, that both fall in love with some similar research, concepts and life options. Although they lived in different contexts and continents, both, because of their struggles in defense of Democracy, were exiled during the military dictatorship regimes and both made the academy a laboratory to read, criticize, interpret and transform the reality of the student and the world around them.

At a conference in Porto Alegre, in October 2016, when talking about communicative autonomy on the Internet, Castells praised the role of Freire as the great promoter of Pedagogy of Autonomy and freedom in the 20th century: “The practice of young people on social media it is reinforcing autonomy and the capacity for cultural redefinition. Deep down, leading to the empowerment of young people. It is ironic that Paulo Freire’s country has forgotten the pedagogy of freedom” (CASTELLS, 2016, on-line)⁴.

For both, the main mission of educational institutions must be to emancipate the autonomy and the protagonist spirit of the student, to free him from the state of heteronomy, imposed by an oppressive, neoliberal system; taking the student out of a culture of fear, alienation, subservience, to a place of “speech”, autonomous, responsible for his own formative journey, acting with a critical, mature and tolerant spirit in the world around him. This autonomy has no fixed date and time, it happens throughout our life, varying according to the intrapersonal and social context of each individual. “Autonomy is constituted in the experience of several, countless decisions, which are being made. [...] nobody is subject to anyone’s autonomy. On the other hand, no one suddenly matures at age 25. We mature every day, or not” (FREIRE, 2000, p. 107).

In the era of digital self-communication, the “word” can be spoken, written, animated in various formats and shared on a worldwide network by anyone. “Saying your word was for Paulo Freire the same as being a subject: when you say the word, the world begins to be transformed, in an exercise of autonomy and creation” (STRECK, 2003 apud. HERBERT, 2015, p. 129). The mass, which was previously excluded from the mainstream media, without the power to “speak”, as described by Freire, a mass in a state of subordination, of silence, of heteronomy, today, with the architecture of digital media, a large part of the population already has the autonomy to create your own media channel and, through it, make your speech reach one or more people from anywhere on the planet. The more people connected, the more possibility of making the transition from the culture of silence, criticized by Freire, to the culture of digital communicative autonomy (self-communication), researched by Castells.

Context and concept of Freire’s “Pedagogy of Autonomy”

The political context in the period in which Freire wrote his last book “Pedagogy of Autonomy: knowledge necessary for educational practice” was marked by the struggle in favor of rescuing democracy and freedoms stolen during the military dictatorship in Brazil. Freire (2006) when speaking of “educational practice” was not limited to educational institutions, but to the emancipatory reality of the citizen as a whole.

Educating in Freire’s conception is not simply preparing the individual professionally and technically for the world of the factory. Following the philosophy of Socratic maieutic, to educate is to elevate the human soul, it is to emancipate, it is to know oneself in order to become master of oneself and thus be the maker of one’s own path. “That is why transforming the educational experience into pure technical training is to unravel what is fundamentally human in the educational exercise: its formative character” (FREIRE, 2000, p. 36).

Freire’s media context - quite different from the context of communicative autonomy in Castells’ digital media - was marked by the Mass Media, top down, unidirectional, restricted to political class, cultural and colonial elites. The working class, the illiterate, the poor who represented the majority of the Brazilian people, were just passive consumers of everything they propagated in newspapers, radio and TV.

It was in the midst of this oppressive political and media reality, living with people without the power of “voice” in the mass media, treated as “anonymous mass”, that Freire became globally recognized, by emancipating and promoting the autonomy and protagonism of people, preferably from the most vulnerable classes, through the Pedagogy of Autonomy and liberating education.

Freire’s description of autonomy has a strong resonance with the thinkers who preceded him. Precisely, we already feel nuances in the Allegory of the Cave, when Plato (1990) reveals to us that it is only possible to leave the interior of the cave into the light through a faculty of the soul: education. Freire (2006, p. 98) said that “the school environment can be one of the fundamental spaces for human beings to exercise individual and collective emancipation practices”.

Etymologically, autonomy is composed of the Greek words: autós (by itself) and nomos (norm, law), that is, the capacity for self-determination, establishing one’s own laws or norms. For Blackburn (1997), autonomy is opposed to heteronomy - the person is heteronomous when his will is under the control of another person and when he acts out of desires not legislated by reason. Therefore, taking Plato’s Cave Allegory as a reference, autonomy is the human will to be free, to govern oneself, to take charge of one’s own life. This happens when man lets the light chase away the shadows (heteronomies) reflected on the walls of our inner “cave” (soul).

In modern Kantian thought, autonomy is making your own decisions, being ‘master’ of yourself, knowing how to differentiate what is good and what is evil, what liberates and what alienates/enslaves. Autonomy means overcoming self-imposed minority (KANT, 2003).

In Freire’s pedagogy, therefore, “Autonomy” is, above all, to free oneself from the heteronomies imposed by the constituted powers, characterized by selective, oppressive and excluding political and economic systems, in order to become a subject, with time and voice, author of his thinking and acting in the world. The construction of this autonomy is similar to an infinite spiral, that is, an unfinished “path”, it does not occur at a scheduled time, it is a “becoming”, it is a continuous process of maturation (FREIRE, 2000).

Context and concept of “Mass Self-Communication”

For Castells (2017, p. 188-189), we live in the beginning of a new communicative era because the decentralized, horizontal and interactive nature of digital media “introduces a new form of communication, mass self-communication, which multiplies and diversifies the points entry into the communication process. This generates unprecedented autonomy for communicative subjects”.

Thus, Mass Self-Communication would be “a new form of interactive communication, characterized by the ability to send messages from many to many, in real time or at the chosen time” (CASTELLS, 2017, p. 101). This form is also associated with the use of communication narrowcasting and broadcasting (CASTELLS, 2017).

At a much higher speed than previous media - printed newspaper, telegraph, radio, TV, etc. - currently, more than half of humanity is already immersed in a communicative ecosystem of digital media and, through it, each person can potentially lead their learning and give voice to their dreams, their indignations, their curiosities and projects of any nature, either for a group selected on closed digital platforms (Telegram, WhatsApp, Facebook group etc.) or for audiences on a scale glocal (local and global) present on open platforms (Twitter, Instagram, Blog, TikTok etc.).

Facebook has the largest population on the planet, with approximately 2 billion and 196 million inhabitants, almost twice the population of China. The second largest nation is YouTube, with around 1 billion and 900 million linked profiles. WhatsApp ranks third, with 1.5 billion subscribers (DI FELICE, 2021, p. 33). In addition to these, there are dozens of other digital media (Telegram, TikTok, Twitter, Clubhouse etc.) populated by millions of users.

This unprecedented media scenario that we are experiencing in the last two decades is a reflection of a “revolutionary transformation of technology, morphology and organization of socialized communication, which has the potential to include society as a whole” (CASTELLS, 2011, p. 11). This paradigmatic change in communication, with the popularization of digital devices open and accessible to all, emancipates the interaction and exchange of messages, increasing the communicative autonomy of the individual inserted in the digital environment. Until recently, only communication corporations had the communicative power in the mass media. With the arrival of the Internet, this traditional hierarchical and closed model of communication companies has been confronted with the communicative power/counterpower of millions of voices that interact in real time in the digital media environment. This happens in view of the fact that “the new culture of autonomy found in the communication media via internet and mobile an incomparable means of self-communication and mass self-organization” (CASTELLS, 2014, p. 19). So, in this new interactive and horizontal space, Mass Self-Communication builds autonomous communication media capable of unbalancing the power and control of communication groups at a global level, belonging to governments and corporations, and, furthermore, it also builds the capacity of connected people to cause changes in the forms of power relationship in the society (CASTELLS, 2007, p. 248).

With Laswell’s communicative paradigm as a methodological reference⁵, the originality that emerges with digital self-communication consists of:

• Who sends: the hegemonic exclusivity of the mass media with the public has been broken. Mass media professionals are forced to live with social media audiences.

• What is sent: the number of sources of information has increased, as never before, because anyone connected to the media can produce and broadcast content on it. Hence, new forms of filters emerge to select, categorize and analyze the volume of data available on digital media.

• In which channel: the control of concentrated channels, in the hands of large media corporations continues to exist, however, living alongside the explosion of millions of social media channels, with the potential to broadcast and publish on a global scale.

• For whom: the mass media is based on a unidirectional and vertical communication carried out by communication professionals with the purpose of marketing to the customers the product (information) of its owner or communication corporation. They must also coexist with the alternative communication present on social media that describes a significant part of what is happening in society, in real time (DEL FRESNO, 2017).

The new communicative ecosystem removes mass communication professionals from the comfort zone, so that they are forced to insert themselves in the uncomfortable environment of social media. This “hybrid” digital media environment forms a universe of interconnected people, who together, immersed in a single communication network, share information, perceptions, beliefs and rumors in real time (FREITAS, 2019, p. 52-53).

Focusing specifically on the field of Education, with the new paradigm of self-communication digital and the recognition of a multiplicity of circulating knowledge, the school is no longer the central place for the legitimation of knowledge. “This diversification and diffusion of knowledge, outside of school, is one of the strongest challenges that the world of communication presents to the educational system” (MARTIN-BARBERO, 2011, p. 126).

Unlike traditional media, new digital media are not only instruments for transmitting content, but “environments” or “ecologies” of coexistence, synchronous and asynchronous interactions. Brazil is the second country in the world to live longer in the digital environment, spending an average of nine hours and twenty-nine minutes on a daily basis. This means that, of the 365 days of the year, we live 145 days in the digital media ecosystem (KEMP, 2019).

In Brazil, the challenge of exclusion in access and digital literacy follows the same line of exclusion from other basic needs. According to the latest assessment of the development of the internet in Brazil, presented by UNESCO (2021), one in four Brazilians does not have an internet; 95% in class A access the internet; 93% in class B; 78% in class C; 57% in classes D and E and among the illiterate only 16%. Throughout history, technological innovations have always benefited people who have financial conditions and cultural openness to enjoy them, as well as creating social exclusion for people who cannot enjoy them. Education, therefore, is the only way that can reduce this exclusion.

The progressive popularization of digital media and their interactive potential for exchanging knowledge, cultures, services and products have generated in the last decades new public spaces for learning, new expressions of political activism, new forms of participation and citizenship (SEBASTIÃO; PACHECO; SANTOS, 2012). The characteristics of digital media platforms - hypertextual, ubiquitous, horizontal, globalized, multimedia - allow each student or user to access and share content, information, in a personalized way, following their path according to the choices of their clicks: Twitter leads to a blog, which leads to a scientific article, which leads to a class on YouTube, which leads to an offer of a service or product and so on.

The contribution of “autonomy pedagogy” and digital “self-communication” to student protagonism in Hybrid Education

Illuminated by reflections from Freire’s Autonomy Pedagogy and Castells’ digital Self-Communication, initially, before presenting some proposals for strengthening protagonism student in times of hybridity in education, we introduce with some questions:

• How are university students researching and learning today, in the era of digital communicative autonomy?

• How to develop, based on hybrid teaching-learning, educational paradigms aligned with the two predominant profiles of students: the hyperconnected, “self-media”, digitally empowered and that student profile without access to the media or with little access?

• Would university academic institutions be aware of the meaning of the advent of a new media-communicative, decentralized, ubiquitous, horizontal paradigm, such as the unprecedented paradigm of mass self-communication, embraced to exhaustion by students, in the ecosystem of digital media?

• If the practice of self-communication digital decentralizes the mass media into millions of “self-media”, weakening the command and control of access to knowledge like never before, how to think and plan hybrid education, aligned with the new skills and competences of the student of the era of connected learning?

• If the university is an environment that prepares the student to understand and live in the culture of his time - which today is increasingly hybrid, on life, ambiguous, hyperconnected, and that consequently requires a more autonomous, protagonist, flexible human being, in order to correspond with the characteristics of the algorithmic culture of digital platforms - what sense does the current massive, standardized, linear teaching-learning model make, very similar to the teaching applied to form the subject-worker of the Industrial Society of the 19th Century?

In uncertain times, complex and profound changes in education systems, questions occupy a central place in the life of every student and educator. First, because in the hybridized education of the digital age, standardized teaching formulas do not serve, as the models of mass education (linear, rigid, worked top down) until the last century; second, because each student has a mindset unique in the construction of their learning; third, because we live in a country that is secularly characterized by the exclusion of basic rights, including the right to quality internet access. Then, having access to the media does not mean saying that the student is genetically/culturally prepared to extract the best of the digital ecosystem for the realization of their life project.

Today, we are invited to reinvent ourselves daily as the speed of change is unparalleled with those of the past. New technologies, new challenges, new jobs emerge every day. A child who is now in his first year of school will occupy jobs that do not yet exist, with paradigms and techniques that his parents and teachers are unaware of. That is why, directly or indirectly, every university student is being influenced by this media-civilizational-digital revolution. “The diffusion of digital platforms and media of interaction between humans, software, algorithms, data, surfaces and connected objects contributed to the creation of a new type of ecology, which is no longer subject-centered, but reticular and interactive” (DI FELICE, 2021, p. 10).

Specifically in the field of Education, according to Martín-Barbero (2014), the revolution in the digital age occurs from the perspective of the decentralization of knowledge. Linked to this, there is also the relocation and timelessness of learning, which replace the centrality and traditional linearity of the teaching-learning process. The new bias through which knowledge is transmitted does not necessarily imply the disappearance of the school, but its transformation to act in the techno-communicative environment of knowledge-without-own-place (MARTÍN-BARBERO, 2014).

If the student, as Castells (2019) demonstrated in his research, is a click away from access to any knowledge, that is, if they have digitized and copied the teacher’s book; all books, magazines and articles from libraries were in internet; the walls of schools and universities were torn down; in short, if almost all human knowledge is available on our mobile devices (cell phone, tablet, laptop), the main mission of educational institutions would be to offer you the necessary skills to strengthen/strengthen the protagonist spirit, so that it can be able to go through his learning process with autonomy, in view of the realization of his life project.

By recognizing students as protagonists in the construction of their learning, demotivation and school dropout are reduced, considered in recent years as major challenges to be overcome. A survey carried out by Ibope, published in Revista Nova Escola, in November 2007, already revealed the need to reframe pedagogical practices in order to reduce students’ demotivation and lack of attention in the classroom. For 70% of teachers, student demotivation was considered one of the main problems in the classroom, followed by a lack of attention and indiscipline (VASCONCELLOS, 2011, p. 34).

Among other elements that can contribute to the strengthening of the protagonist spirit of the student in the era of hybrid education, we highlight, for example, the relevance of:

• Redefining conventional university pedagogies, which are still similar to the “banking” and “broadcasting” conception of teaching, for pedagogies focused on the “personalization” of education, through the use of active, gamified, dialogic methodologies that correspond to the new profile of the student of the era of self-communication digital, an autonomous, multimodal, non-linear, protagonist and interactive being;

• Develop computational thinking in the student, so that he molds the technologies (AI, Big Data, Blockchain) to the real needs of your research problem or study project;

• Educating and making the student aware of the risks of algorithmic “bubbles” and the understanding of the market and ideological logic (capitalism) of platform magnates and digital media, which violate the data protection law and the principle of isonomy and the net neutrality;

• In the era of information abundance, helping students develop technical-cognitive and socio-emotional skills to filter what really “matters” to carry out their academic/life project;

• Digitally literate the student, presenting the thousands of on-line courses, open and self-instructional educational resources (SANTOS, 2013) on multiple digital platforms, video tutorials and podcast on any area of knowledge. Parallel to this, guaranteeing the student quality internet access policies, inside and outside the university walls;

• Motivate the student to “learn to learn” always, encouraging him to the culture of hybrid, ubiquitous and perennial learning;

• To offer flexible study techniques and methods that are adaptable to the reality and purposes of the student with and without internet, so that he has the possibility to learn “in his own way”, becoming, as described in Freire’s pedagogy, a doer of your own way.

The pedagogical application of these and other elements will certainly strengthen leadership student. We believe that digital education (literacy) is the main way to empower students who live a good part of their life immersed in the digital environment, enabling them to have a critical autonomy, which allows them to take advantage of the breadth of opportunities and facilities of the digital environment, so that you not only access timidly or forcibly, but freely experience this universe. The literature itself on the theme of Blended Learning presents several pedagogical methodologies that place the student as the protagonist of their learning process, through the inverted classroom, peer-to-peer learning, problem-based learning, culture maker, gamification, among others (MORAN, 2015).

Final considerations

In times of pandemic, student leadership is the “central pillar” of hybrid education. However, before thinking about strengthening student protagonism, it is urgent to review the current educational paradigms. With the emerging communicative autonomy in digital media, we see a new paradigm, more decentralized, of command and control in access to knowledge, incompatible with the pedagogical paradigms of the past centuries, still present in higher education institutions.

Kuhn (1970), in his book “Structure of scientific revolutions”, calls it “paradigmatic anomaly”, when the old theories and methodologies do not represent and do not meet the demands of the “extraordinary sciences”. The theoretical and pedagogical models of the mass culture era of the 20th century do not meet the demands of the new generation of the digital age, which is born and grows within new techno-media-cultural ecologies. This pedagogical anomaly reverberates in the speech of the Portuguese pedagogue Pacheco (2017, on-line), when stating that “an educational model in which students of the 21st century are ‘taught’ by teachers of the 20th century is not acceptable, with practices of the 19th century”⁶.

Raising awareness of the magnitude of these techno-media and cultural transformations leads us to rethink the cognitive, theoretical and pedagogical paradigms of hybrid teaching-learning, inserting them within the philosophy of decentralized reintermediation, the one that characterizes the very nature of social media digital architectures.

In this context of media civilizational revolution, the struggle for student leadership must be an ethical and urgent imperative. If the pedagogy of autonomy was Freire’s greatest banner of struggle, at the height of the mass media today, with different communicative formats and paradigms (digital self-communication), education for student leadership must be the main vocation and mission of higher education institutions. This urgency of a student doing his own way accelerates with the increasing hybridization of university institutions, which, living with the uncertainty of new pandemics, are adapting to the new teaching-learning methodologies on life, seeking to extract the best in the on-line environment and the best in the off-line world, in order to offer the student, the best ways to develop the necessary skills, in view of the realization of his academic/life project.

Anyway, we are aware that the reflections raised here - in the light of Freire’s “Autonomy” and Castells “Self-Communication”, on the relevance of student leadership in times of hybridization of education - are a simple invitation to enter one of the main arenas studies that will be consolidated in the post pandemic. Unlike the educational model designed based on the philosophy of mass culture of the last century, the new methodologies and pedagogies of education in the era of Digital Culture On life will radically redesign the 21st century education paradigms, in order to correspond with the philosophy of life of the new student of connected learning and ubiquitous: more autonomous, protagonist and builder of his own learning path.

• 1
  In the Portuguese language, the term “protagonism” appears approximately 18 million times in the Google search; the term “Autonomy” appears 45 million times and “personalization” appears 24 million times.
• 2
  To find out more information about Covid-19, visit the Ministry of Health website. Available at: https://covid.saude.gov.br. Accessed on: Mar. 4, 2021.
• 3
  Onlife neologism - coined by the information philosopher, Luciano Floridi, professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Oxford University - was inserted in the “Onlife Initiative” Project, to describe an infospheric and always more hyperconnected reality, where it no longer makes sense to make the distinction between being on-line or being off-line. Available at: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-319-04093-6. Accessed on: Feb. 22, 2021.
• 4
  Available at: https://www.fronteiras.com/artigos/fronteiras-10-anos-manuel-castells. Accessed on: Feb. 26, 2021.
• 5
  Lasswell (1948) was one of the pioneers in analyzing the communicational “act” in the Mass Media, starting from the Who? Say what? Which channel? To what effect? For whom?
• 6
  Fiocruz Virtual Campus. Available at: https://is.gd/YoUT4q. Accessed on: Jan. 2, 2021.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  13 Dec 2021
• Date of issue
  2021

History

• Received
  20 Nov 2019
• Accepted
  06 Mar 2021