News on DE: a critical analysis of discourses on distance education in Brazil

Abstract

In recent years, with increasing number of courses offered in distance education modality, mediated by new technologies, this issue has been gradually obtaining ground in the media, through news, ads, for instance, especially in digital settings. Whereas news help to build social representations based on the discoursivization of events, and that this significantly influences the construction of people's opinions, it is in our interest to investigate how this process has occurred with respect to distance education, reflecting on how the evaluations conveyed by the news contribute to the formation of social representations about this modality of education. Based on the theoretical field of Critical Discourse Analysis, this work examines a corpus consisting of 9 news, which circulated during the year 2011, from three Brazilian news portals on the Internet with large access by the public. We noticed that in discourses, though timidly, a more positive image has been constructed about this modality of education.