“I like to be intellectually challenged”: the identity building of university professors in a formative activity

Abstract

The world has gone through some deep transformations, many of which motivated by digital technologies, which end up changing the way we interact, work, read, communicate and even the way we perceive ourselves. Since the way we teach and learn is affected by these changes, it starts to be the role of the universities, responsible for the teacher training, to insert its own on the hybrid and multimodal culture. Considering that, it was developed a training in a community university in South Brazil to introduce its graduate and undergraduate professor in the hybrid and multimodal culture. The activity required the development of cards bearing a photo and a short narrative about themselves. Based on the perception that identities appear in the development of the image of the self and of the others (DE FINA, 2015) and considering that the word choice bears images revealing the way the narrator perceives itself (DAVIES; HARRÉ, 1990), this paper aims to analyse the way which university professor build their identities and place themselves discursively in a multimodal narrative. For this research, three professionals from the Polytechnic School and three from the Humanities participated. The results show that social media interferes in their writing and that one of the factors which distinguish one group from the other is the identification with the teaching profession by the Humanities professors.