Does school still have the authority to teach in the 21st century?
Visiting Scholar researches how university students use or do not use digital devices to study in their last year of high school.
Leonardo Monteiro's research attempts to understand the authority and legitimacy of the school and the role of elements of an industrialized culture accessed by screens when senior high school students were going to study outside the school environment. In an article from the late 1970s, Neil Postman announced that television had occupied the space of the first curriculum in the lives of children. Today, this first curriculum is interactive screens on which, from an early age, children have access to an immense myriad of contents. Among them are those that are educational and reflect school contents and others that are educational but teach about things that school does not teach, like a make-up tutorial, for example. The first question of Monteiro's social investigation reflects precisely on this dynamic concerning school. Are these elements accessed through screens taking the place of school? Or is the school using these elements to revive its authority? Questions like these arise from the research.
Another point of Leonardo Monteiro's research is its comparative character. Monteiro had already collected data from Brazilian university students about the year before they entered university and hopes to collect data from students of California universities during his stay in the United States. This comparative phase of the research is fundamental for the researcher because, as already declared by sociologists such as Jesus Martin-Barbero and Nestor Canclini, since the last century Latin America in the field of communications suffered an enormous cultural influence of the products of the North American cultural industries. Moreover, as pointed out by Christian Laval, the U.S. is the epicenter of several changes in how schools have functioned in recent years. Therefore, while investigating how students study outside the school environment, Leonardo Monteiro also intends to describe two local histories of students involved in a global process of screen ubiquity that has been modifying daily human life in all its spheres.