Critical pedagogy in digital times

Abstract

This article critically analyzes the impacts of educational platformization and the financialization of teacher training in Brazil, linking these processes to the transformations of digital capitalism after 2008. From the field of critical agrarian education, it investigates how business logic and corporate governance models have redefined the role of public institutions, teachers, and curricula, especially through the actions of corporate foundations, EdTechs, and private organizations within public policies. Through a qualitative methodological approach, with an exploratory and analytical character, the text denounces the advance of an algorithmic pedagogy, guided by goals and indicators, which depoliticizes teaching work and empties its emancipatory dimension. In contrast to this trend, the text recovers the theoretical and political foundations of Latin American critical pedagogy, highlighting the legacy of Paulo Freire, the conception of the teacher as an organic intellectual, and the contributions of Southern epistemologies. It values the role of public universities and federal institutes as territories of resistance and affirms the importance of teacher training programs anchored in rural social movements, such as PRONERA and Saberes da Terra. It concludes that resisting platformization does not mean rejecting technology, but rather disputing its meanings and uses from a rooted, critical, and territorialized perspective. In times of deepening neoliberalism, training teachers committed to social and environmental justice also means training individuals of resistance and hope