Editorial

Abstract

There are countless challenges in higher education. One of them, perhaps because of its obviousness, tends to go unnoticed. At this level of education, adults are formed "with" adults. In this sense, one of the legacies of Paulo Freire, which will be discussed here, is that of having inspired a decolonizing conception of adult education, translated into the idea that one learns in communion. This pedagogical principle underlies current approaches to cooperation, collective intelligence and monitoring. Most of the articles in this issue of Revista Brasileira de Educação focus on higher education under this perspective, centered on the interpersonal relationships that are established, logically among adults, in the university environment. The texts focus on the perception of the other, raising issues related to collaborative learning, less verticalized teaching strategies, professor and intellectuals training, as well as situations of ethnic and gender discrimination linked to academic mobility programs. Current and pertinent themes that contribute directly to teacher education policies, to the quality of higher education, to internationalization programs, and to the use of new technologies in the current academic context. The topics of collaborative learning, network interaction and more symmetrical relationships are addressed in three articles. The first one, "The perception of the other person in the virtual learning environment: social presence and its implications for Distance Education", by Willyans Garcia Coelho and Patrícia Cabral de Azevedo Restelli Tedesco, discusses collaborative learning in Distance Education (EaD). It takes as central category the notion of social presence, understood as the ways people interact with each other in virtual learning environments (AVA).The reflections indicate that studying the level of social presence in these environments becomes fundamental to optimize the collaborative learning in EaD. The second article, "Towards a more symmetrical approach to the ZPD in teacher education", by researchers from Brazilian, Canadian and Norwegian universities, is based on the notion of a zone of proximal development (ZPD) to study the social interactions between a novice teacher and an expert. The originality of the proposal is to theorize learning in symmetrical and non-asymmetrical terms, in which a more competent pair would mediate learning. The article shows that the roles of teacher and learner do not coincide with institutional hierarchical positions, and that learning takes place in cogenerative, dialectical, coteaching relations. The third text, "Collaborative work in red drive professional development of teachers", by Maria José Navarro Montaño, Antonia López Martínez and Maria Elena Hernández de la Torre, presents a case study on collaborative learning among education professionals focusing on students with autism. The study was carried out with a group of eleven teachers who contrasted, among them, their strategies of educational intervention with these students. The results ...