This thesis has identified and analysed the role of an NGO called Gadra Education in advancing education rights to the less advantaged people of Grahamstown in South Africa. Gadra Education’s role has been identified as twofold. Firstly as an educational NGO, Gadra Education’s initiatives directly impact on the lives of the less economically and socially privileged learners who, due to their previous learning environment in state schools, do not achieve academic results that ensure entry into tertiary level. Secondly its role is identified in its nature as an organisation that emerged due to the deficiencies in the state schooling system. It therefore stands de facto as a critical institution for critique of the state’s education system. The thesis concludes that without confronting the Department of Education or collaborating with it, Gadra Education offers a significant alternative approach which can potentially influence the state to improve the state schooling system. Its strategy of non-confrontation to the state, informal and non-corporatist is advantageous as an NGO that focuses on the actual provision of education. It focuses on instilling Ubuntu values of sharing and giving that are of critical significance in teaching and learning. The context of the thesis is located broadly within socio-economic rights and specifically on education rights. In South Africa where the state has not adequately met the educational obligations for the economically and socially less privileged citizens, the emergence of educational NGOs that focus on providing education to the poor is of vital importance. Although other NGOs that confront the state are important in pushing the state to deliver especially on school infrastructure, teacher deployment and other educational challenges, Gadra Education model ensures academic success for the learner. Lessons can be drawn from Gadra Education which can be potentially useful to state schools and other NGOs that seek to advance education rights to disadvantaged communities.

[pt] A pandemia de Covid-19, decretada em março de 2020 pela Organização Mundial da Saúde, afetou os mais diversos aspectos da vida humana, especialmente diante das milhares de mortes reportadas todos os dias pelos meios de comunicação. No Brasil, uma das áreas mais prejudicadas tem sido a educação básica pública. O fechamento das escolas como medida sanitária demandou das secretarias estaduais de educação a adoção do ensino remoto emergencial. Nesse contexto, caracteriza-se pela readequação das atividades escolares para meios remotos com tecnologias digitais, principalmente. A pesquisa que originou esta tese objetivou analisar os sentidos hegemônicos atribuídos a essas tecnologias, a partir dos discursos dos documentos orientadores para o ensino remoto, disponibilizados pelas secretarias estaduais de educação em seus portais de internet. A abrangência e relevância desses documentos permite identificar convergências relacionadas à concepção de educação mediada por tecnologias, especialmente no que tange ao trabalho docente, mesmo em regiões e condições muito heterogêneas. Para a investigação dos documentos orientadores, a tese se utiliza do aporte teórico-metodológico da análise de discurso crítica, que compreende a linguagem como prática social e oferece modelos de análise que revelam assimetrias e desigualdades materializadas no discurso. O estudo identificou como sentidos hegemônicos de tecnologias digitais nos documentos a redução do processo de ensino-aprendizagem ao mero compartilhamento de conteúdos via aplicativos e plataformas, o que evidencia uma expropriação do trabalho docente; o solucionismo tecnológico – uma crítica bem fundamentada às tecnologias como solução para qualquer problema – e as tecnologias digitais como objetos neutros, portanto, isentos de ideologia. Diante da precariedade no acesso aos artefatos para acompanhamento do ensino remoto emergencial, a tese conclui, ainda, que as tecnologias digitais, posicionadas hegemonicamente como solução para manutenção das atividades escolares, ao mesmo tempo em que capturam os sistemas públicos de educação e expandem seu controle sobre o trabalho docente, podem aprofundar as desigualdades no acesso à educação. / [en] The Covid-19 pandemic, decreted in March, 2020 by the World Health Organization, affected various areas of human life, especially in the face of thousads of deaths reported every day by the media. In Brazil, one of the most devastated areas has been the elementary public educational sector. The closing of schools as a sanitary measure made the State Education Departments adopt the emergency remote teaching. In this context, it may be defined as a reorganization of classroom practices to remote methodologies with the use of Digital Technologies (DT) principally. The research that originated this thesis aimed at analyzing the hegemonic meanings of these technologies identified in the discourses of the documents of State Education Departments for remote teaching, found in their websites. The coverage and relevance of these documents enlight convergences related to teachers work, even in different regions of the country and very heterogeneous conditions. In order to analyze the documents, the study applied the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) as a theoretical approach and method, which defines language as a social practice. Also, it offers models that reveal social inequalities and problems, materialized in the discourse. The study identified as hegemonic meanings of Digital Technologies in those documents the reduction of teaching and learning process to the simple sharing of contents through apps and platforms; technological solucionism – a well founded critic to the concept of technology as a solution for everything – and the DT as tools or ideology-free objects. With the difficulties in the access to equipments for remote teaching, this thesis also concludes that Digital Technologies, hegemonically understood as the solution to keep teaching and learning process during the pandemic, captures public educational sectors and expropriate teachers work, while they deepen inequalities in the acess to Education.