Conceptual breadth of blended learning in Brazilian education: innovation, fashion or “trading name”?

Abstract

Technologies are protagonists of interactive processes of global teaching and learning and play different roles in the educational context, either as mediating instances that enable and enhance communication, interaction and learning, or as obstructive, hindering elements of this process. Given the social and economic abyss aggravated by the Covid-19 pandemic, such antagonism seems to be the result of an epistemological gap regarding the role of ICT in education and, recently, the scope of hybridism in education. Sometimes considered as an approach that mixes synchronous and asynchronous, sometimes as a “trading name” or something that does not exist in the scope of educational legislation, it seems to emerge in the country as something that transcends these aspects in the sense of constituting an innovative pedagogical process that demands new perspectives and epistemology. The objective of the research was to highlight what the national literature points out about innovation in education and how blended learning is conceived. Through a qualitative analysis of a corpus of 102 academic articles, results indicate that blended learning is associated with innovation in education, demanding institutional efforts in collaboration for the constitution of a new culture, whether at school or in teacher education in higher education institutions.