Emotion, Platformization and Artificial Intelligence in Language Teacher Education: A Systems Approach

Abstract

Drawing on a systems approach to emotion and language grounded in Maturana's biology of knowing, this article argues that platformization in Brazilian language teacher education is the instantiation of the post-modern bio-cultural age, - a continuation of the modern project of domination that has progressively dismantled relational, emotional, and circular forms of life. Drawing on the biology of knowing and on visual narrative research theorized here as orthogonal intervention, the study examines visual narratives produced by twenty Brazilian pre-service language teachers asked to visualize how feel about artificial intelligence and their imagined professional futures in 2034. Nineteen future-oriented narratives constitute the primary analytical focus. This study’s analysis identifies five identity configurations across the corpus, four of which are feared: the supervisor, the platformized, the warrior, and the obsolete. The single desired configuration, the techno-collaborator, remains defined primarily by accommodation to algorithmic authority rather than by orthogonal relationship with it. Juxtaposed with visual narratives of in-service teachers already working under platformized conditions in Brazilian public schools, these findings suggest a temporal collapse between feared futures and documented present realities. I interpret this collapse as a bio-cultural phenomenon. Fear functions as political envisioning, registering a civilizational drift toward control, hierarchy, and the erosion of relational pedagogy. Against this emotional contraction, the article develops orthogonal interactions and liberating conversations as concrete educational alternatives, grounded in the biology of loving into dialogue with the counter-colonial and pluriversal visions of Bispo dos Santos (2015) and Krenak (2019, 2020).