Teacher Struggle in Times of Platformization of Public Basic Education: A Critical-Discursive Analysis of Labor Union Technodiscourses

Abstract

This article analyzes union technodiscourses on the platformization of public education, taking as its corpus two digital news reports produced by representative organizations of education workers, affiliated with Sintep/MT and APP-Sindicato/PR. These texts, characterized as journalistic-digital technogenres (Paveau, 2017), discuss the impacts of platforms on teaching work, denouncing illness, work overload, loss of autonomy, and technological imposition by state education departments. The study investigates how unions discursively construct resistance to platformization and what representations they produce about teachers, management, and technologies. The main objective was to analyze the discursive strategies mobilized by the entities in denouncing technological coercion and in defending alternative ethical-pedagogical meanings. The research was grounded in Critical Discourse Analysis (Magalhães, 2010), which understands identities as processual constructions intensified by the digital environment. The results revealed representations that victimize teachers, criticize managerial practices, and expose silencing and subalternization (Spivak, 2010) in the face of the lack of teacher participation in technological decisions. Strategies of legitimation and delegitimation (van Leeuwen, 2008; Wodak, 2009) and discursive polarizations (van Dijk, 2008; 2011) were also identified. Union technodiscourses constitute an organized field of resistance, in which teacher autonomy, democratic participation, and the defense of dialogue stand in opposition to technomanagerial rationality.