ABSTRACT
The purpose of this article is to analyze the challenges faced by public school teachers in the State of São Paulo (Brazil) in promoting public policies to integrate media education practices into the school curriculum, taking into account the challenges of the educational use of media and digital technologies, as well as perceptions regarding the need for continuing teacher education. The methodology combines quantitative and qualitative approaches, including a survey applied to 135 elementary and high school teachers and two focus groups with nine participants. The results indicate that the consolidation of media education within the curriculum depends directly on the articulation among continuous teacher education, adequate infrastructure, and stable public policies aligned with contemporary digital culture. Significant tensions emerge between the normative requirements established in curricular documents and the concrete institutional conditions of schools, particularly regarding limited technological resources, dependence on government platforms, and restrictions on teachers’ autonomy in content selection and production. The findings also reveal that, although teachers recognize the central role of media in shaping youth subjectivities and in everyday school practices, persistent challenges remain related to the fragmentation of professional development initiatives, work overload, and the lack of pedagogical methodologies that promote student agency and the critical integration of media into teaching practices. In this context, media education is understood not as a curricular add-on, but as a strategic field of teacher and civic education, requiring favorable working conditions, pedagogical autonomy, and public policies capable of ensuring continuity, democratization, and educational meaning in media practices. Thus, the study reinforces the need for stronger articulation among schools, educational management, and digital culture in order to sustain critical, contextualized, and socially relevant pedagogical practices.
KEY WORDS
Brazil. Communication Studies. Curriculum Integration. Education Policy. Media Education. Teacher Professional Development.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.34135/mlar-26-01-07
Constructing Media Education in Brazilian Schools: Professional Practices and Policy Formation © 2026 by
Egle Müller Spinelli, UCM Trnava is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.