This paper aimed to investigate the digital literacies of kindergarten and elementary
school teachers in the municipal teaching network of Araguaína-TO in the context of the
pandemic, considering the use of digital technologies in the teaching and learning process
and its implications in the lives of teachers. The dissertation is grounded in the field of
Applied Linguistics and in the perspective of literacy studies. Well as, in-depth
knowledge of digital technologies is part of digital literacy, Kleiman (1995), Buzato
(2007) and Soares (2002) conceptualize digital literacy as the social practices that are
intertwined and modified with digital technologies. This is a qualitative field research
with an interpretativist and exploratory approach, based on Flick (2009). To treat the data
we will use the content analysis technique (BARDIN, 2016). The data were collected
between the months of November and December 2022 by means of an online semi-
structured questionnaire, hosted on the Google Forms platform, containing 24 questions,
21 of which were multiple choice and 3 with short answers. In addition, another resource
used to validate the research was an on-site interview in which the researcher visited in
person some teaching institutions in the municipal network of Araguaína-TO to verify the
data with some teachers who participated in the research. In all, 171 educators participated
in the research, 96.5% female teachers and 3.5% male teachers, 62% from early childhood
education centers and 37% from elementary I schools. It is believed that this research
presented significant results for the area of applied linguistics and literacy studies. The
results allowed us to state that digital technologies make up the social context of the
research participants, and the teachers' lack of digital literacy had negative impacts, since
in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic, during emergency remote teaching, digital
technology was the main tool used by the category. The teachers' accounts also
corroborate that many of them faced many difficulties regarding the use of digital
technologies. Although many educational institutions had technological equipment, there
were still teachers who made little use of it in their pedagogical practices, which prevented
them from improving their digital literacy. Therefore, it is believed that the mastery of
digital technologies implies positively in the teaching-learning and interaction process of
educators during emergency remote teaching.
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