Projeto Taba Eletrônica (FALE/UFMG): a emergência de uma comunidade de prática de formação de professores

Abstract

This study analyzes the contributions that the community of practice called Taba Eletrônica, established at the Faculty of Letters/Languages of the Federal University of Minas Gerais - UFMG for teachers and undergraduate students, providing them with opportunity to improve their digital literacy and to participate in didactic and pedagogic practices and in extension programs beyond the walls of the university, offering training for in-service teachers to make use of current and emerging digital technologies in their classrooms, promoting a continuous update of its members and beneficiaries knowledge and competence as to technological innovations. To that end, it analyzes the dimensions of this community and its practices taking into account a corpus consisting of interactions between members of this community in the virtual learning environment Moodle and in open social networks, identifying elements which relate it to the concept of learning that Lave & Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998) state as being characteristic of a Community of Practice - CoP. Analyzed in light of the adopted theoretical assumptions, the data extracted from this corpus show the mutual engagement, joint venture and shared repertoire dimensions intertwined in various activities carried out by this community, marked by: technical expertise, willingness to share, discuss and build knowledge and digital (multi)literacy; socioaffective character relationships; convergence statements (consensus) and divergence (dissensus); commitment; distributed/situational leadership; different patterns and levels of negotiation; collaboration and teaching-learning (learning from one another, from the machine, from vicarious experiences, etc.); and its members' plurality of skills and abilities. It concludes, therefore, that Taba Eletrônica Taba is a community of practice, within the meaning attributed by Lave and Wenger (1991) and Wenger (1998), and lists and comments some of their most significant activities and achievements between 2007 and 2014.