Social media and Autonomy: thinking about racism and sexism during an ESP class in Brazil

Since the 90’s, several trends have been developed in the autonomy research area in Brazil, based on individual (HOLEC, 1981; BENSON, 1997, 2001), sociocultural (OXFORD, 2003; NICOLAIDES; MATOS; MOTA, 2013) or complex perspectives (BORGES, 2019). In these perspectives, topics such as the teacher’s role (PAIVA, 2005), the material’s role (TILIO & NICOLAIDES, 2011) and technology (MOTA, 2017) have been explored in the studies of teaching and learning additional languages in different fields: public and private schools, universities and on-line environments. Due to the advance of new digital technologies, it becomes necessary to analyse the use of social media and its relation to students’ and teachers’ Autonomy (RAYA et al., 2007; MOTA, 2017) through the mediation between more and less experienced peers (VYGOTSKY, 1984). This research was conducted with 28 students during some English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classes in Niterói city (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) in a federal public school, during the first semestre of 2019. During the classes, discussions about the role of women in the job market were conducted and, in groups of 3 or 4, the students were asked to imagine they owned a company and had to create a) an antiracist and antisexist advertisement and b) the mission and vision of the company. After that, they had to share their posts on the Instagram account created for this purpose. The preliminary results indicated that the groups used another app (WhatsApp) to organize their ideas and to negotiate the Instagram posts content. Students reported the importance of such discussions for their professional development. The preliminar results also indicate that the apps used helped to mediate the learning process which was based on great collaboration and organization of ideas, even though not all of them were familiar with the technologies used.