Education Journal 2022; 11(6): 383-393 http://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/j/edu doi: 10.11648/j.edu.20221106.20 ISSN: 2327-2600 (Print); ISSN: 2327-2619 (Online) Popular Pedagogy in the Times of COVID-19: Digital School or Digital Culture William Soares dos Santos 1, * , Mariarosaria de Simone 2 1 Department of Didactics, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 2 Department of Humanities, University of Naples ‘Federico II’, Naples, Italy Email address: * Corresponding author To cite this article: William Soares dos Santos, Mariarosaria de Simone. Popular Pedagogy in the Times of COVID-19: Digital School or Digital Culture. Education Journal. Vol. 11, No. 6, 2022, pp. 383-393. doi: 10.11648/j.edu.20221106.20 Received: December 18, 2022; Accepted: January 11, 2023; Published: January 30, 2023 Abstract: This work seeks to reflect upon the importance of critical training in the use of digital media in educational contexts. In such a period in which the school is necessarily forced to become 'digital', one wonders if this complex, and probably necessary, path of renewal brings along an equally and devoted commitment regarding better practices concerning educational intentionality with the use of the new technologies. Therefore, it is in this direction that we have chosen to bring critical research about a reading experience in the Brazilian context. It is an experience that highlights the importance of a perspective of social emancipation where action and reflection are intimately connected and translate into the promotion of a "praxis" that is critically deepened against the hegemonic thought of neoliberalism, which is, at the same time, dispersive. We defend a reading perspective against the manipulations of oppressors who, thanks to the web, feed hate, racists, and misogynist ideas, which are contrary to any kind of equality among human beings. Along with this perspective, the role of educational agencies is invested with an enormous responsibility in promoting digital literacy that provides everyone, especially young people, with tools capable of allowing management and the critical use of the enormous amount of information in which we are immersed. Today, it is important to strive for perspectives of education based on freedom, on the autonomy and the construction of truly democratic societies, in which the benefits and responsibilities of the democratic rule of law can be shared by all people, regardless of their color, origin, religion, sex. Keywords: Education, Narrative Studies, Education During the COVID-19, Education and Democracy, Digital Literacy 1. Introduction: Digital School or Digital Culture During 2020 and 2021 was a period in which, due to the pandemic, educational contexts, both formal and non-formal, had to transform themselves into virtual contexts, from classes in the classrooms to the Classroom, from universities to Microsoft Teams rooms, from gyms to courses on YouTube, from singing and theatre schools to online courses on Zoom or via video calls from WhatsApp, we must strongly question how fundamental is the educational responsibility of educational institutions and teachers, doing so for now, even behind the PC screen, in promoting, in addition to their own areas of interest, also a critical training in the use of digital tools. By that we mean a digital education that favors paths where one takes care of the relationship ‘in presence’, even when one is at a distance, and where, in a ‘critical and cooperative’ climate, the co-construction of knowledge is encouraged, together with an ethics of responsibility and an ecology of communication. Beyond the diatribe between those who demonize and those who support the educational potential of the web and of the digital environment, between the apocalyptic and the integrated [1], it would seem more constructive to start from a fact: “in a culture like ours, used for some time to divide and to divide everything in order to control it, it is perhaps disconcerting to be reminded that, as far as its practical consequences are concerned, the medium is the message. That, in other words, the individual and social consequences