Teaching Students to Think in an Age of Information Overload: Rethinking the Role of the Teacher in the Digital Society

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.22533/at.ed.51572726240310

• Palavras-chave: : Pedagogical Mediation. Digital Society. Critical Thinking. Professional and Technological Education. Artificial Intelligence.

• Keywords: : Pedagogical Mediation. Digital Society. Critical Thinking. Professional and Technological Education. Artificial Intelligence.

• Abstract:

  This article examines the challenges of contemporary teaching practice in contexts characterized by information overload and the expansion of digital technologies and artificial intelligence. It is a theoretical-analytical essay grounded in contributions from pedagogy, the psychology of learning, and social theory, drawing on authors such as Paulo Freire, Lev Vygotsky, Edgar Morin, and Byung-Chul Han. The analysis articulates five conceptual axes—pedagogical mediation, active learning, critical thinking, digital society, and complex thinking—as categories for interpreting the transformations of teaching in digital culture. The results indicate that the traditional notion of pedagogical mediation proves insufficient to respond to the cognitive demands imposed by environments marked by an abundance of information and the fragmentation of attention. As a theoretical contribution, the concept of intellectual curation of learning is proposed, understood as a teaching practice oriented toward the organization of attention, the critical selection of information, and the structuring of meaningful cognitive pathways in complex digital ecosystems. It is concluded that, especially in the context of Professional and Technological Education, teaching must move beyond instrumental approaches and promote an integrated intellectual education capable of articulating critical reflection, imagination, and a contextualized understanding of reality.