Keywords

1 The Teacher in the in-Between Place: Teacher Identity in ODL

The concern with identity is not new, but it has never been so discussed as in the present times. Stuart Hall (2005), a cultural studies theorist, explains that one can notice “a true discursive explosion around the concept of identity” (Hall 2005, p. 103). Why is identity so widely discussed? For Hall, the social theory argument for the question points to the identity crisis itself, because “the old identities, which for so long stabilized the social world, are in decline, giving rise to new identities and fragmenting the modern individual, hitherto seen as a unified subject ” (Hall 2005, p. 7).

With the purpose of understanding identity today, Hall (re)constructs conceptions of identity and their character of change in late modernity. In this sense, he weaves concepts of identity linked to the subject of the Enlightenment, the sociological subject and the postmodern subject. How can we think, then, the teacher and his identity construction in this course? What’s more, how do new technologies, especially in ODL, impact the teacher’s construction of self?

Thus, we intend to discuss, in this article, the teaching identity, a tangle of threads and textures that articulate both their knowledge and life histories and the academic paths they follow. Our objective is to analyze and discuss the identity constitution of teachers, as an inter-place, who work in distance education of a higher education institution in Sergipe, Brazil, from interviews about their academic pathways as well as the impact of their work in distance Education.

Therefore, it is indispensable to build the concept of Identity here, to also think about the identity of the distance learning teacher. To do so, we not only followed reading paths and sought the definition of identity in the mapping of these printed reflections, but we also discovered how identities are produced in times of “capitalist modernity”, “late modernity”, “postmodernity”, “liquid modernity” or simply “modernity”. Nonetheless, a dated modernity, which brings about changes in actions, in thinking, including the definition of what identity is. When, then, we think of modernity as opposed to contemporaneity, the question of the teacher’s identity in his broad performances is recurrent, and important for our reflection.

The changes in the conception of identity to determine the subject of late modernity are predicted by the lived historicity itself. First, by the birth of Renaissance humanism, which placed man at the center of the universe and gave him the faculty and the ability to investigate and decipher the mysteries of nature. Second, by the very meaning given to the rational explanations imprinted by the rational and scientific man, the one who understands nature and human history. Third, the modern subject emerges from “a more social conception of the subject. The individual has come to be seen as more localized and ‘defined’ within these great structures and sustaining formations of modern society” (Hall 2005, p. 26). We, therefore, come to the conception given to the identity of the subject in late modernity: that of open, contradictory, unfinished, fragmented identities.

To analyze the issue of identity and difference, Woodward (2000) offers elements that can contribute to the explanation of how identities are formed and maintained. The author’s ideas can be summarized as follows: one needs to conceptualize and divide identity into its different dimensions to understand how it works; identity often “involves essentialist claims about who belongs and who does not belong to a particular identity group” (Woodward 2000, p. 13); these claims may focus on representations based on essentialist versions of history and assumed as unchanging truths.

Identity is relational and difference is represented by a symbolic mark; identity may also be linked to social and material conditions; the social and the symbolic, each of them, even when referring to different processes, is “necessary for the construction and maintenance of identities”; it is essential in the conceptualization of identity to verify the classification systems established between two or more groups; identities are not unified because there may be contradictions within them; it is still necessary to explain “why people assume their identity positions and identify with them” (Woodward 2000, p. 15).

In the interplay between identity and representation, Kathryn Woodward (2000) shows that the meanings, which bring sense to our experiences and to who we are, are produced through representations, by which individual and collective identities are established. The symbolic systems, upon which representation is based, can provide answers to questions such as: “Who am I? What could I become? Who do I want to be? Discourses and systems of representation build the places from which individuals can position themselves and from which they can speak” (Woodward 2000, p. 17). The meanings imprinted by the discourses only become effective “if they recruit us as subjects.” In this sense, the “positions we take and with which we identify constitute our identities” (Woodward 2000, p. 55).

Identity in modernity today lives the emergence of interstices, which are characterized by the overlap and displacement of domains of difference, in which the interests of the community or the cultural value are negotiated. Cultural clashes arising out of the antagonism or affiliation itself are articulated by a complex negotiation that “gives authority to cultural hybrids that emerge in times of historical transformation.” The right to express oneself does not depend on the persistence of tradition, but the discourse is nourished by the power of tradition, the recognition or identification granted by tradition. “By reenacting the past, it introduces other immeasurable cultural temporalities in the invention of tradition” (Bhabha 2005 p. 21).

Therefore, there is no possibility of a fixed identity, original in its precepts, but an identity produced from (re)constructed, (re)staged elements of a tradition, in a middle space and a revisionary time for interventions in the here and now.

The frontier work of culture requires an encounter with ‘the new’ that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates an idea of the new as an insurgent act of cultural translation. This art not only takes up the past as a social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, reconfiguring it as a contingent ‘middle-place’ that innovates and disrupts the present. The ‘present-past’ becomes part of the need, and not the nostalgia, to live (Bhabha 2005, p. 27).

In the desire for recognition, springs up a hybrid cultural space, as an intervention space, wherein identity is staged. The identities in contemporary times are produced by this movement that takes place in the interstitial spaces of border territories, in the inter-places, where something comes to be and differences arise. The building of identity today requires understanding in the process of continuous transformation of social life through which social, professional, cultural, and political identity pass.

Identity has lost its old frame of reference and reveals itself as something to be invented, not discovered. Therefore, Bauman (2005) draws attention to the importance of the debate on the theme of identity and warns against seeking comforting answers in the classic founders of Sociology, to the problems of identity in times of “liquid modernity”. “When identity loses the social anchors that made it appear ‘natural’, predetermined and non-negotiable, ‘identification’ becomes increasingly more important for individuals who desperately seek a ‘we’ to which they can ask for access” (Bauman 2005, p. 30). Maintaining something that unites or seeking group affiliations, which allow us to experience a sense of belonging and to build identity are part of a struggle against the loss of reference, in a logic of dissolution or fragmentation of values that had kept individuals stable until then.

Therefore, it is essential to define who we are and to which group we belong. So it is with teachers, where relationships in the construction of their own identities and their belongings have the clarity of the links, even if imaginary, that keep us as a group. Collective identity located, perhaps, in interstitial zones, borders, or in-between places, but imprinted in the movement of manifestations and constitution of memories.

We will articulate here, then, identity as ideological positions that are built from verbal interactions. In this sense, we will adopt some concepts that delineate identity not as fixed, but as mobile places that are established in the interloculation with the groups and the stories to which we belong. (Bakhtin 2014, 2015; Harré 1999; Harré and Moghaddam 2003; Harré and Van Langenhove 1998). In this sense, it is possible to think of identity as a boundary, but one established by language, as proposed by Bakhtin 2014) by the dialogic dimension of relations. In this conception, the flow of positions, of the self and the other, configure themselves with dialogic constructions in the contemporary transits of the coincidence between spatiality and temporality, therefore of Chronotopes. Language is the space of ideological struggles (Bhabha 2005; Bakhtin 2015) that are established from the tensions of exotopy. It is the self and the other, which in their interactions and tensions produce the identity configuration, in our particular case the teachers who live experiences in person and in distance learning.

Identity, then, will be approached here as a creative configuration of oneself in which the other, the interlocutor, is present, therefore from an in-between place. The self-configuration (identity) is perceived by the other as an aesthetic, in which morals and activities are constructed from an ideologically and historically positioned verbal interaction (Borges 2008; Borges et al. 2016; Borges and Barbato 2015). Thus we have the questions that guide us: How then will the identity of the ODL teacher be given? What are the aesthetic configurations that constitute themselves as belonging to the group of teachers? What are the tensions that disrupt an identity that is constantly developing but screaming for an understanding of the new technological and cultural dynamics of the world?

The identity configuration of the distance education teacher occurs in dialogue with the students via VLE (Virtual Learning Environment). The mediation and the way of identity building cross over the times of the face-to-face encounters and now transit through a virtual space that extends the borders and at the same time bridges spaces and times. Belonging to a world of “liquid” identities in motion, the teacher also passes through these movements in their identity constructions. The “Who I am” and “how I am perceived” in their daily configuration, in their ways of performing their activities, are different from face-to-face. It resides in the motion-space of a spectacular organization (Dèbord 1997) that reaches the student in their interactions. In the message thread, the teacher is part of a written dialogue, deprived of the day-to-day oral routine. By their choices and by their virtual presence of activity. But they move through social media, making it a place of meaning making of self as well.

2 Studyng Teacher´s Identities from ODL

For the construction of the data of this research we made narrative and episodic interviews about both the in-person and distance learning teaching practices and the activities developed by 4 teachers. Narrative interviews focused on their life histories and episodic interviews aimed at revealing their academic trajectories as of their entry into distance education. The interviews were individual, all interviews were recorded and later fully transcribed for the analysis of empirical information. The duration of each interview was on average 40 min, and each participant was interviewed twice. During the investigation process we use fictitious names to assure confidentiality and protect the privacy of the participants.

We used thematic analysis through the dialogical analysis of conversation adapted to psychology (Barbato and Caixeta 2011; Linell 1995; Mey 2000; Rosa et al. 2009; Silva and Borges, 2017). Initially, the interviews were transcribed ipsis litteris. From the interview transcripts, we identified the themes developed in the different parts of the discourse, as well as the subthemes that best characterized each discourse stage, from which we built a semiotic map with the main meanings perceived in the interviews.

3 The Teacher’s Identity: Moving Between the Face-to-Face and the ODL

There is one single identity, that of teacher. However, it meanders through different places and positions when we observe the interviews of the participants. We noticed, as in other research done by us (Borges 2012; Borges et al. 2014; Borges et al. 2012; Borges et al. 2016); that the identity construction in the interviewed teachers is also based upon the relationship with the student, with the other that guarantees their alterity, positioning them in the interaction (Harré 1999). It is from the student and his “absence” that the teachers’ identity and role are placed

in tension, evidencing a conflict experienced by the teacher identity crisis when working in distance learning.

The following is the map built from the interviews with the ODL teachers: (Fig. 1)

Fig. 1
figure 1

Maps of identity threads

Full size image

See below an excerpt of the interview with one of the teachers.

Researcher::

What is the teacher’s role in ODL?

Teacher::

It really is something that. I don’t have an answer to give you. Because… We’re not there right? And I don’t know how the student perceives this. How does he feel the teacher, he is there watching, there is a screen and he is watching. So the teacher, the role of the teacher in the classroom is. It is not just pouring knowledge, but it is making that student reflect, that the student. He. Connects the knowledge of the subject with his daily life, with which he is stimulated. So I think there are a lot of questions that I think are really about stimulating learning right? Because learning it is not a one-way thing, I tell my students: you are responsible for your learning, if you think you will sit in the chair, listen to the teacher for an hour and fifty and you will be able to acquire something, you will not, so then you have the active role. And quite often that student does not see this active role, so our role is not paramount: the teacher is everything in the teaching process. He is not! The student also has a very important role. He needs to seek it, he needs to realize this. (Prof. Margarida)

The teacher interviewed makes clear in her speech the difficulty of perceiving herself as a teacher in ODL “I don’t have an answer to give you. Because… We’re not there, right? ”. We noticed that the absence of oneself in the relationship with the other generates a tension that we understand as a movement to seek oneself as a teacher. Where? How? In what relationship? It is in a place that is not yet defined, because it changes from a face-to-face to a virtual relationship. At times face-to-face, at other times distance learning. But later in her speech, the teacher develops arguments that enable us to understand that there is an attempt to build oneself and the other in this relationship. Always from the student: “Because learning is not a one-way thing, I tell my students: you are responsible for your learning.” Then, Margarida begins to identify with other functions of her activity.

How is this explained? For Stuart Hall (2005) broad changes in social structures have shaken the subject’s frames of reference and thus do not have stable anchoring in their social world. It recognizes, if you will, the fragmentation or dislocation of modern identities, that is, they are being decentralized, no longer fixed or unique. In a constant process of transformation, the identities in late modernity are “constructed in multiple ways along discourses, practices and positions that may intersect or be antagonistic.” (Hall 2005, p. 108)

From this line of analysis, Silva (2000) questions the identities defined in what they are in their essence, or sameness: I am Brazilian, I am from Minas Gerais, I am a historian and that is it. For the author:

Identity and difference have to be actively produced. They are neither creatures of the natural world nor of a transcendental world, but of the cultural and social world. It is we who manufacture it in the context of cultural and social relations. Identity and difference are social and cultural creations (Silva 2000, p. 76).

It can then be said that the affirmation of identity and difference establishes connections with power relations. Both identity and difference “are not simply defined; they are imposed. They do not live harmoniously side by side in a field without hierarchies; they are disputed” (Silva 2000, p. 81). This dispute, translated by the affirmation of identity and the enunciation of difference, shows “the desire of the different and asymmetrically situated social groups to guarantee privileged access to social goods” (Silva 2000, p. 81).

4 Theme 1: Construction of the Teacher in ODL

All teachers interviewed started working in ODL after some time in face-to-face teaching, which seems to be, until now, one of the characteristics that mark the academic path of most distance learning teachers: starting to work in distance education from a collective history of ODL itself in the institutions they work. I say, so far, because you can already see a generation of teachers who start their academic career in distance learning, not having worked in face-to-face, classroom teaching previously.

Prof. Jorge::

It’s face-to-face that say face-to-face and distance learning that when I started at distance learning I had already worked over 30 years as a face-to-face and university professor at PUC and so on from Rio Grande Sul and now I work in undergraduate face-to-face courses […] 32 h in ODL I am either at the Center of Social Communication (CCS) transmitting via satellite or I am giving online support for students or I am producing like now after practically three years 2009 2010, 2011 2012 restructuring all the material that was posted on the OLE, which worked well for some time and can still work; but which has already been streamlined and improved … The texts were revised at the end of the semester we are finally improving this proposal that will be education as much as classroom education or just a mode that happens via communication media that no longer limit in time and space this relationship between the educator and the student […]

Prof. Margarida::

Look … my experience in ODL started about a year ago before we had an experience that was a shorter experience, of a partnership that formed with a Social Service college and a university in Brasilia my training is in Social Service and a college that had closed and the university made a deal with the Ministry of Education to complement the training of those students who no longer had a college halfway through their courses and then we built some material some handouts and later we came to have contact with these students in classes that were not via satellite as they are today right? So the contact was by phone via e-mail, chat and the material that was their book and they there in Brasilia it was such a bad thing because it was an emergency thing we didn’t have well structured Social Service course it was very exhausting for the teachers, so much of the production of the material that was a soemthing very new for us it was the written language right? It has a very different connotation it has to interact with the student and this was very challenging for us and we did it and also challenging because it is for our training in Social Service there is the body of work right? The Social Service category in Brazil is extremely opposed to distance learning right? So we had to reconcile this direction that the teacher takes in Brazil to be contrary to distance learning and to what the university was pleading with us and then it was done and after that the Social Work the ODL Social Work course it assumed a new format which is the format that exists today together with other undergraduate and licensure courses

5 Theme 2: Differences Between Face-to-Face and Distance Learning

Prof. Jorge::

Well I’m so delighted with ODL is how enthusiastic I am to get into a classroom like this morning with sixty students and stand upside down on my hands and tomorrow not a little later from five to ten at night I enter a TV studio here at UNIT that has really cool equipment right? And you have two classes there until ten at night and you are absolutely alone in a studio and making it happen feeling that there must be one now there must be two three thousand people that are following me at that moment

Prof. Margarida—:

So I see that the big difference is the classroom itself it is the contact with the student, the exchange of knowledge, obviously the fact that I already have a face-to-face experience a great teaching experience has made it possible for me to hold a dialogue right? From the intonation of your voice, your look, not going too fast all of this is not controlled in the classroom is in ODL, you have to look, you can’t go too fast nor too slow, you have to have the answer because you are being recorded there huh?

We noticed in the teachers’ discourse that the difference between face-to-face and distance education is important for how they position themselves as teachers. Although many draw from their face-to-face experiences in classroom teaching, the differences take over their reorganization as teachers. The lack of face-to-face contact with the student, their mode of communication and the resources for interaction.

6 Theme 3: Relationship Between Teacher and Student

Prof. Jorge—:

because they are in the countryside they go to the center where the tutors are there is the big screen there is the group so even though the teachers and the whole program come from a few hundred kilometers away and they are interacting via satellite and via this technological apparatus anyway right? From this extremely new virtual media they have support, so it’s one thing I insist I think about over and over again if the learner is induced and seduced. Think of it! a Philosophy class with this conceited guy I tell stories I stand upside down on my hands […] But then you get eighteen hundred e-mails [] saying teacher when you go live all through one hundred minutes the class is alert and you can’t hear a fly in the classroom there at the center because you tell stories you interact there are the tweets they send I mean and when it comes to ODL and Philosophy imagine that in this country you are wondering ask two girls about what their experience with Philosophy was like in high school and you get a boring teacher who spoke of Plato and Aristotle and other meaningless stuff and then take a test where you had to reproduce what such-and-such said right?

The positions taken by the subject are in the chronotopes of their activities, in the space-time relations or in the different systems of interactions.

It is precisely because identities are constructed within and not outside discourse that we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional locations, within specific discursive formations and practices, by means of specific strategies and initiatives. Moreover, they emerge within the game of specific modes of power and are thus more the product of marking difference and exclusion than the sign of an identical, naturally constructed unity, of an ‘identity’ in its traditional meaning. - that is, an all-inclusive sameness identity, a seamless identity, whole, without internal differentiation (Hall 2005, p. 109).

With the incorporation of technologies in education in the current context, students and teachers yearn for some form of inclusion and adaptation. The former seeking their education and in need of guidance; the latter, having to know what and how to teach. With the innumerable existing sources of information and the considerable ease of access, the teacher’s role as content transmitter is outdated and must be rethought, as well as the way to deal with new students, who are increasingly better prepared for the dynamism that technology favors.

In this new scenario, therefore, there is a change in the roles of teacher and student: both have to develop new skills and attitudes and always remain open to new conceptions about teaching and learning. It can be said that the change in the role of the teacher constitutes the great challenge posed by distance education. Given this process, the most effective teaching technologies in distance education will be those that offer better communication and enable learning. Everything possible should be done to bring back the connection between teacher and student in a similar way as that of the face-to-face classroom. If distance education ensures this connection, it could offer a quality leap for education in its broadest sense.

Kathryn Woodward (2000), in turn, points out that identity is relational, built by the marking of difference and sustained by exclusion, so it is both symbolic and social. In the text “Identity and Difference: A Theoretical and Conceptual Introduction”, Woodward (2000) begins by quoting a story narrated by writer and broadcaster Michel Ignatieff, where he shows the issue of identity and difference in Serbian and Croatian relations. In this sense, identity is relational because:

Serbian identity depends, for its existence, on something outside it: namely, another identity (Croatia), an identity that it is not, which differs from the Serbian identity, but which, nonetheless, provides the conditions for it to exist. Serbian identity is distinguished by what it is not. To be Serbian is to be a non-Croatian (Woodward 2000, p. 9).

The difference is thus marked by the denial of any similarity between the two peoples. Contemporary identities are characterized by conflict, contestation or possible crises that are sustained by the appeal to historical antecedents, in the sense of seeking the past to reaffirm one’s identity. This, for Woodward (2000), can generate new identities. Therefore, in relation to the constitutions of teacher identity, we highlight the construction of identities not by geographical but by symbolic territory, understanding the activities as ideological markers of established relationships, in this case the difference between teachers and students, face-to-face and virtual.

So to speak, the author questions whether identity is fixed, whether there is a “true” identity, and points out that in order to address identity and difference there are alternatives for analysis, and discussions often focus on the tension between essentialist and non-essentialist identity perspectives. She shows that to work with the issues of identity and difference, it is necessary to clarify the core concepts that involve the discussion and also a theoretical framework for the understanding of the processes that point to the construction of identities.

7 Tema 4: Difficulties ODL

Profa. Margarida—:

The hard thing is, if I didn’t have the experience that I have, and it is for me my great differential, it is precisely the contact that does not exist this exchange you do not see the student’s reaction you do not observe this student right? So you’re talking and being recorded, the students are there watching you but you don’t have this feedback, you don’t know how it is being received from the other side and this is very important for the teacher right? Even to change the voice intonation, to speak louder, because the student is more distracted, stop when the student does not understand and then return to, my class in the face-to-face classroom is very guided in relation to the student, so much is that I have the same classes with the same content and my relationship to productivity is totally different, because the student when interacting with the teacher sets a totally different dynamic in the classroom. So you’re working the same content in a different room and another and the other is really pretty tiring, demotivating for the student and demotivating for the teacher because there is no exchange this is the big issue in ODL and it challenges us to keep up that pace all the time without having the exchange, so in relation to training it is how it came into this process right?

If he has the teaching practice. If he has the pedagogical experience this is quickly resolved. Because it’s really about you learning new ways of interacting. But he needs to have this, this pedagogical look and then I think this is solved because it is really about you learning new ways of interaction I do not see myself, for example, being another teacher in ODL. I am the same, my language with the student, the way I speak to the student is the same way I speak in person. Right? The very same way. My concern that the student is following or not I do not have this feedback but my way is. So I think that the teacher is not prepared, but he is not prepared because he has not experienced it, today the teachers who are here I believe they already are, I no longer believe it is a very difficult thing to be resolved no.

Prof. Jorge;:

(…) there in the VLE there are many tasks there is a Philosophy book and there is the chat scheduled for such and such day he has to access because the teacher is there in real time with colleagues he can interact […] there is a discussion thread that has a series of questions that all students are invited to participate in and think a little and post their idea to hold an. Exchange. It is a work results […], for example, we are in the month of May already in the final stretch of the second semester yes because we started in February, March, April and May, beginning of June it already ends. Think of it! That there are people who don’t know it yet. They have not yet realized the first assessments have gone by already, a world of activities already happened they come desperate, a message from a student teacher what can I do, I’m enrolled in such and such discipline. Imagine that! I mean if there is no maturity in the counterpart nothing will happen […]

The difficulties that arise in distance learning are always compared to the face-to-face classroom, and focus mainly on the lack of contact and communication with the student. Teaching identities, by crossing boundaries between the face-to-face and the virtual, and moving freely between the symbolic territories of different identities, subvert the boundaries that delineate the territories, thus creating interstitial zones. In his analysis, Silva (2000) refers to movements that subvert and complicate identity. These are interstitial territories or zones where different identities move and hybridize.

These symbolic interstitial zones can mean the movement of different identities resulting in hybridization by the conjunction of different factors that blend together, bringing down the hegemonic identity without conflict. According to the author: “If the movement between borders highlights the instability of identity, it is on the borders themselves, on the thresholds, in the interstices, that their precariousness becomes more visible” (Silva 2000, p. 88). And it is about these areas of subversion that teacher identities are reorganized into spaces and chronotopes where new consciousnesses interact, as processes of a place in between.

8 Theme 5: Students in ODL

Prof. Jorge::

Juliana, Danyelle: Where is Juliana? Where is Danyelle? They are in college they say proudly […] why this pride because they know that whenever they need to ask something ask Juliana or Danyelle right? Ask the girls why? Because you’re in college, man. Such-and-such is not in college could not know this but my daughter is in college they ask one thing completely off and you can say mother but I have not yet studied this and they do not want to know if you have already dealt with it or not you You’re in college and you have to get things done if they say or do something stupid, daughter! You’re in college! […] they expect a young person, beyond the specific subjects, to be a thinking human being, so you can develop that even from a distance, you can seduce in the sense that they are motivated to read. I hear it all the time teacher the other day a girl said to me: teacher after our classes there is no news on television that go by without me asking why they are saying this why is Globo talking like this and the other talking the way they are, […] what they are hiding not that she is not able to sit in front of the television for entertainment, to play for fun she gets some things from a speech which hide other things unsaid and this is the formation of a critical spirit so well I’m so delighted with distance learning.

A crucial point in this perspective is to pay attention to the importance of the mediation of knowledge in virtual environments once knowledge occurs in the relationship between the Subject and the Object. In distance education, there are several mediating elements between the Subject and the Object of knowledge. The mediation of knowledge in distance education, using information and communication technologies, must integrate these elements and rely on them to their advantage.

The goal is that the presentation of content is made available in various ways. Each student (respecting their cognitive style) should anchor the construction of knowledge from one or more of them, using the different potentialities and resources they offer. The material available on the Internet therefore represent one of these possibilities. After all, as Pedro Demo would say, “Virtual reality has not just been discovered. It has always been part of reality - the gods are seen as real, though not physical. The feeling of missing a child who is far away or who has died creates its virtual presence. Reality is multidimensional.” (Demo 2003, p. 83)

9 Final Considerations

If there is something coherent to be done in Distance Education is exactly to break the tendency to see it as a merely profitable service, and incorporate new languages (imagery, sound) in the teaching and learning process in these virtual environments, not dissociating the use of technologies from each society’s unique and institutional conditions, as well as from the subjective conditions of teachers in particular.

Precisely because we are programmed, we are able to stand before programming and think about it, question and even to divert from it (…) we are capable of infering even within the programming of which we are a result (…) the human vocation is to “know” the world through the language we were able to invent socially (…) we become able to unveil the world and “speak the world” (…) In this sense, language is not only a vehicle of the act of knowing, but it is the act itself (…). We need men and women who, along with technical and scientific knowledge, are also inclined to know the world differently through non canonical types of knowledge. The denial of this would be to reproduce the hegemonic process of the ruling classes, which always determine what the dominated classes can and should know (Freire 1993, p. 241).

We assume that, as stated by Valente (1993,1999), technologies, when paying attention to the pedagogical component, can create circumstances in which the expression of individuals is broader and learning encompasses other aspects beyond only the formal, logical one, such as the aesthetic and the emotional aspects, the Cyberwriting and thus, meet the symbolic demands and the hypertextual logic that are characteristic of the current context, as well as build more plural, collective and interactive knowledge. This is because the formation of networks of interacting people facilitates the exploration of other human dimensions, enabling the construction of different teacher identity processes.

Affirming identity and difference implies inclusion and exclusion, the definition of what we are and what we are not, belonging and not belonging, the separation between “us” and “them”. Therefore, “it means delineating borders. It means making distinctions between what is inside and what is outside. (…) This establishment of boundaries, this separation and distinction, suppose and, at the same time, affirm and reaffirm power relations” (Silva 2000, p. 82).

An “in-between place” in then created, analyzed by Homi Bhabha (2005) as a bridge that determines neither one or another place, but a border territory, a result of identity hybridization. Bhabha (2005) shows that in contemporary times “we are at the moment of transit when space and time intersect to produce complex figures of difference and identity, past and present, interior and exterior, inclusion and exclusion” (Bhabha 2005, p. 19). This sense of disorientation is a disturbance of direction, an exploratory movement of individuals to position themselves. However, the author states that:

What is theoretically innovative and politically crucial is the need to move beyond the narratives of original and early subjectivities and to focus on those moments or processes that are produced in the articulation of cultural differences. These ‘in-between places’ provide the ground for the elaboration of strategies of subjectivation - singular or collective - that initiate new signs of identity and innovative positions of collaboration and contestation in the act of defining the very idea of society. (Bhabha 2005, p. 20)

In this sense, Bakhtin (2015) also explicits that identity is built on the exotopy of two consciousnesses. The dialogic interaction is established between the subjects and their exchanges provided by the encounter in a chronotopy, in which time and space coincide. But we wonder, in ODL, what is the time and space of the encounter? For if both are virtualized, then we no longer speak of a physical or virtual space, since in asynchronous communications time differs between the interlocutors. Therefore, we can say that the times and the spaces are those of the consciousness of the interlocutors. Teachers and students then build their identities in the dialogic games provided by the interlocution of their consciousnesses.