[Inter]Dicted dialogues: teacher training within the context of the national literacy policy and the [im]posed curriculum

ABSTRACT

Intending to analyze the relationship between continued training within the scope of the National Literacy Policy - PNA with the [im]posed curriculum, thinking about the [inter]dicted dialogues that frame so many other discourses that go beyond the pretension of the one/single word, from the Literacy Practices Course, looks at the discursive materialities “Literacy Practices: Book of the Literacy Teacher - Strategies” (Brasil, 2021a) and “Literacy Practices: Book of Activities” (Brasil, 2021b). Qualitative in nature (Sampieri; Collado; Lucio, 2013), it uses Discursive Dialogical Analysis (ADD) (Brait, 2006), in view of the concrete statements of the Official Discourse based on the aforementioned materialities, dialoguing with authors in the field of discourse (Bakhtin, 2011; 2017; Volochinov, 2017); educational policies (Ball, 2001); of the Curriculum (Lopes, 2004; Lopes; Macedo, 2011); literacy (Soares, 2004; 2020), among others. The results are indicators that, like previous policies, the PNA, as a voice of authority, permeates the official literacy curriculum, being able to reflect on the speeches and practices of literacy teachers, even within the recontextualization process. By dictating “new” senses and meanings for literacy as a skill based on the linguistic code, it [imposes] the curriculum for the literacy circle, privileging content and strategies anchored in systematic phonics instruction, prohibiting other possibilities of meaning: writing as code; literacy as the ability to encode/decode; phonic method; focus on teaching the grapheme-phoneme relationship and the isolation of phonemes.

Keywords:
Literacy; Teacher training; Curriculum; Policy

RESUMO

Intencionando analisar a relação entre a formação continuada no âmbito da Política Nacional de Alfabetização - PNA com o currículo [im]posto, pensando os diálogos [inter]ditados emolduradores de tantos outros discursos que ultrapassam a pretensão da palavra una/única, a partir do Curso Práticas de Alfabetização, lança-se o olhar para as materialidades discursivas “Práticas de Alfabetização: Livro do Professor Alfabetizador - Estratégias” (Brasil, 2021a) e “Práticas de Alfabetização: Livro de Atividades” (Brasil, 2021b). De natureza qualitativa (Sampieri; Collado; Lucio, 2013), vale-se da Análise Dialógica Discursiva (ADD) (Brait, 2006), em vista dos enunciados concretos do Discurso Oficial a partir das materialidades referidas, dialogando com autores do campo do discurso (Bakhtin, 2011; 2017; Volochinov, 2017); das políticas educacionais (Ball, 2001); do Currículo (Lopes, 2004; Lopes; Macedo, 2011); da alfabetização (Soares, 2004; 2020), dentre outros. Os resultados são indicadores de que, assim como as políticas anteriores, a PNA, enquanto voz de autoridade, atravessa o currículo oficial da alfabetização, podendo refletir nos discursos e práticas dos professores alfabetizadores, mesmo no seio do processo de recontextualização. Ao ditar “novos” sentidos e significados para a alfabetização enquanto habilidade assentada no código linguístico, [im]põe o currículo para o círculo alfabetizador, privilegiando os conteúdos e estratégias ancorados na instrução fônica sistemática, interditando as demais possibilidades de significação: escrita como código; alfabetização como habilidade de codificar/decodificar; método fônico; foco no ensino da relação grafema-fonema e no isolamento de fonemas.

Palavras-chave:
Alfabetização; Formação de professores; Currículo; Política

Introduction

“The word accompanies all ideological creation as its indispensable ingredient.”

(Volochinov 2017, p. 100).

Educational policies are political-ideological discourses situated in a chronotope crossed by ideologies. Ideologies reflect a social group’s way of seeing and feeling at a given time (reflection), while clashing with other ideologies in order to acquire the value of truth (refraction). In this process [of reflecting and refracting], evaluative horizons are broadened, and it is through these that the dialogical subject values the words of others and resigns them, making them their own-other words. The given word [from others] becomes a created word [of one’s own] in the process of authorship.

The production of discourse, especially official discourse (documents, laws, curriculum guidelines, programs, etc.), reverberates in ordinary, everyday discourse. Therefore, there is an encounter with the discourse of other subjects, in a dialogical response-counterresponse relationship. It is from this dialogical perspective of language that this discursive paper intends to analyze the relationship between the unfolding of the concept of continuing education within the scope of the National Literacy Policy (PNA) and the imposed curriculum. However, this discussion problematizes the interdictated dialogues that frame so many other discourses that go beyond the pretension of the single word, as every given word is transformed into a created word, because “[...] the utterance is never just a reflection, an expression of something that already exists outside of it, given and finished. It always creates something that didn’t exist before him, something absolutely new and singular, and something that also has to do with value” (Bakhtin, 2011, p. 326).

In the enunciative-discursive arena, the PNA, by seeking to interdict meanings and the construction of others, defends the concept of literacy as the ability to encode and decode phonemes and graphemes, supported by the prescription of the phonic method, through systematic phonics instruction. The method advocated in this policy is ideologically justified by the postulates of the cognitive science of reading, anchored in the discourse of the latest scientific evidence.

Literacy, in the PNA, is imposed as “[...] the set of reading and writing skills in an alphabetic system” (Brasil, 2019b, p. 18). This perspective conceptualizes the alphabetic system as “[...] that which represents the sounds of speech with the characters of the alphabet (letters)” (Brasil, 2019b, p. 18), in order to defend: language as a code; writing as an encoding activity; and reading as decoding. This conception of literacy contrasts with and distances itself from other ways of approaching written language at school defended by the social sciences of reading and writing, in which the conception of literacy, although considered to be of different natures, are overlapped in the contexts of curricular practices.

In the movement of meanings, the counter-response to the ideological model allows the literacy to be conceived from the perspective of alfaletrar (alphabetizing) (Soares, 2020): alphabetizing is a process that emerges not (only) as writing technology, responsible for the appropriation of a set of techniques, operations and skills that are necessary for reading and writing practices. It is understood not only as the mastery of the representation of the alphabetic writing system, of the normative standards of orthography, but as a social event in which the understanding of the social uses of writing makes it inseparable from literacy (Soares, 2020).

Literacy is a word in absentia (Bakhtin, 2011) in the PNA, whose discursive intention was to break with the process of bricolage (Ball, 2001) seen in literacy teacher training policies during the three governments that preceded them. This discourse sought to legitimize itself on the grounds that the conception of literacy in Brazil, until then, had an ideological nature, which aimed to ideologize the process of teaching and learning the written language through the bias of Constructivism (Ferreiro; Teberosky, 1985) and Literacy (Soares, 2020), and therefore had to be fought, initially, in the field of discourse (Ball, 2001), of meanings.

The literacy proposal imposed in the PNA reduces the concept of literacy to the mere ability to encode and decode words, phrases and/or small texts, as well as restricting the possibility of training subjects who reflect on the social and living character of language in use, of the pragmatic language that is the basis of multiple events of interaction mediated by discursive genres (Bakhtin, 2011). However, if we change the conceptions of alphabetizing and literacy, we also change the concept of curriculum linked to them.

In this discussion, the imposed curriculum is practiced as a product of discourses in interaction, bearing in mind that it is from the word of others that one’s own word is formed, this word being one’s own-word, because discourses emerge in the movement “mine and the other’s”. In this relationship of incompleteness, reflecting and refracting have a dialogical nature, even if they are intended to be antidialogical.

This qualitative study (Sampieri; Collado; Lucio, 2013) uses Dialogic Discourse Analysis (ADD) (Brait, 2006) to analyze the curriculum of the Literacy Practices Course as concrete enunciations of the Official Discourse at the time, which in turn implies the school curriculum and the ways of being a teacher in literacy practices.

In discursive continuity, this paper is divided into two other sections. The first deals with the literacy policies and teacher training programs that have been in force in Brazil over the last 20 years, problematizing the relationship with the course curriculum and its influence on literacy practices. The second observes more specifically at the PNA’s Literacy Practices Course, analyzing the works “Literacy Practices: Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies” (Brasil, 2021a) and “Literacy Practices: Activity Book” (Brasil, 2021b). Following it, we present the final considerations of this research.

Teacher training policy(ies): resonances in the school curriculum

Over the last two decades, in the 21st century, Brazil has fostered significant changes in the field of continuing education for literacy teachers (Gatti, 2021). In this scenario, the implementation of political actions, such as the Literacy Teacher Training Program - PROFA (Brasil, 2001), Pró-Letramento (Brasil, 2007), the National Pact for Literacy at the Right Age - PNAIC (Brazil, 2012) and the National Literacy Policy - PNA (Brasil, 2019), have led to the emergence of training discourses that are reflected and refracted in the curricular practices of teachers in the literacy cycle.

It would be naive to adopt the concept of curriculum imposed by the official discourse, which disregards the multiple dialogical and ideological crossings that underlie the identity and subjective construction of each literacy teacher as a socially and ideologically situated subject. In the same way, the centripetal force of these discourses is not denied, as it reflects on the teacher’s way of being and on their curricular decisions.

The construction of a curriculum is not neutral, so it implies a conception of education that involves moral values about the concepts adopted of a good person, a good society, social roles, structure and superstructure, in addition to its normative character, which is called a critical role (Young, 2014). In view of this, what knowledge should make up the curriculum; who prescribes it; in what chronotope; under what interests and conditions. According to Young (2014, p. 199), the curriculum has this relationship, forming a tenuous line between official pedagogical discourses and pedagogical discourses of recontextualization: “In the first case, it refers to the government and its agencies; in the second, to professional associations of specialists in the educational community, particularly teachers”.

At the level of discourse, the different positions on the ideological nature and power of the word tension the process of producing and re-signifying the curriculum. In this way, literacy teacher training policies are constructed under the aegis of a curriculum that represents the world view of a group that holds the official discourse and has the power of agency (Melo; Almeida; Leite, 2022), in a given space-time. Regarding to the curriculum and its possible meanings, we stress that

[...] the structure of a discourse does not stop the movement of differences, of the possibilities of new unforeseen meanings. Discourse tries to produce closures of meaning and the field of discursivity always opens up to new unforeseen meanings (Lopes; Macedo, 2011, p. 252).

In the relationship between discourse and practice, the curriculum to be taught is an organized selection of knowledge to be learned, which can sometimes regulate the didactic practice that is developed during the teaching process (Sacristán, 2013), reflecting, in some way, in the practice of literacy teachers, when they take part in continuing education programs, such as those mentioned above (Brasil, 2001; 2007; 2012), considering the dialogical relationship between training discourses and teachers’ knowledge about their professional practice.

In this dialogical relationship between practice and the imposed curriculum, there is the process of recontextualization, as mentioned, a term coined by Basil Bernstein (Young, 2014), discussed internationally by Steffan Ball in the recontextualization of educational policies; and, on the Brazilian national scene, by Alice Casimiro Lopes, in the debate on curriculum policies, renaming it “reconfigurations” (Lopes, 2004). In turn, the curricula of continuing education programs present continuities and discontinuities, which are called bricolage (Ball, 2001), both in the official discourse and in the [curricular] practices: “In the proposals expressed in official documents, the meanings of practice are also expressed; in the daily practice of schools, the marks of the official discourse are also inscribed” (Lopes, 2004, p. 116).

In short, there is no teacher training program or literacy policy that escapes curricular definitions and, in this meeting of voices, dialogues, reflections and refractions in and through curricular practices. This reaffirms that teacher training programs have a direct impact on practices, since “[...] the curriculum thus becomes this political struggle for meaning, but also for the meaning of what society, social justice, emancipation and social transformation are” (Lopes; Macedo, 2011, p. 253).

Bringing aspects of literacy policies from the last twenty years into the conversation, it should be noted that PROFA, created by the Ministry of Education (MEC) in 2001, under President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, with a view to combating school failure in literacy, was created and implemented because of the inadequate training [lack of training] of literacy teachers, as well as the lack of qualified references for planning quality proposals that would meet students’ learning needs (Brasil, 2001).

The conceptual and methodological focus for the training of literacy teachers was based on Emília Ferreiro’s postulates from the Constructivist perspective, from the perspective of the Psychogenesis of Written Language (Ferreiro; Teberosky, 1985). In this way, PROFA training established the relationship between theory and practice, so that, in methodological implementation, teachers had to start from the diagnosis of children’s hypotheses about written language through the written representation of the sound chain of speech.

In 2007, the Ministry of Education (MEC) launched the Continuing Education Program for Primary School Teachers - Pró Letramento, based on the discourse of seeking and promoting improvements in the quality of teaching and learning in reading, writing and mathematics. This program differed from the previous one both because of the political context of its launch, which took place during the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and because of the theoretical-methodological broadening of the concept of literacy, bringing to the table the discourse of literacy linked to literacy (Soares, 2020). In this program, teachers come across studies and reflections on working with textual/discursive genres in the literacy process, considering that coding and decoding the written language only left out the living language and its social uses, therefore being instigated to reconfigure curricular practices, which needed, at that juncture, to think about meaningful literacy based on the social uses of the written language, through genres.

Considered a successful program due to the improvement in student proficiency, attested to by the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (INEP), Pró-Letramento was in operation from 2007 to 2010, when PNAIC was implemented, a program of President Dilma Rousseff’s government, which began in 2013. This Pact aimed to prioritize the continued training of literacy teachers working in the first three years of elementary school. It aimed to create strategies so that, by the end of the third year, all children would be literate by the age of eight.

In defense of the discourse of literacy at the right age, PNAIC worked on similar principles to Pró-Letramento, to reinforce literacy based on literacy and work with textual/discursive genres, and to Profa, by considering the contributions of constructivist theory. However, it innovates by proposing a discussion on phonological awareness (Morais, 2019) linked to Literacy (Soares, 2004) and the Psychogenesis of Written Language (Ferreiro; Teberosky, 1985). PNAIC thus denotes the expansion of literacy curricular practices, with a view to the ways and possible strategies for literacy: reading corner, pleasure reading, games to develop phonological awareness, assessment instruments to monitor learning to write.

In this dialogical-interactive relationship, PNAIC has become a government program that is a bricolage of previous programs, extending from 2013 to 2018. When it ends in 2019, the PNA is implemented in the country, a policy that breaks with the theoretical-methodological-curricular approach experienced/perceived/practiced by literacy teachers in the three teacher training programs mentioned above.

The PNA was the materialization of what was proposed for the first 100 days of the President Jair Bolsonaro’s administration (2019-2022), with the aim of implementing a proposal to react to previous policies based on the literacy bias. This policy, regulated in April 2019 by Decree No. 9.765 (Brasil, 2019a), was launched in August of the same year, with the publication, on the website of the Ministry of Education (MEC), of the booklet, entitled National Literacy Policy, containing the entire outline (Brasil, 2019b) that describes it.

In defense of the phonics method as the most appropriate methodological approach for teaching literacy to Brazilian children up to the 2nd year of elementary school, the PNA claimed to be based on the most recent and successful scientific evidence for teaching literacy, proposing online training for teachers and school managers through the Tempo de Aprender Program (Brasil, 2020a). This program defended the postulate that it was based on a comprehensive teacher training perspective that aimed to address the main causes of literacy deficiencies in Brazil, as described in the ordinance that regulates it (Ordinance No. 280/2019). It was aimed at pre-school and the 1st and 2nd year of elementary school in municipal, state and district public schools.

The PNA, as it unfolds in the Tempo de Aprender Program and, progressively, in the Literacy Practices Course, makes use of the words of others (subjects, times and spaces) to construct its own words. The defense of the phonics method as the most promising “way” to literate Brazilian children at the appropriate age recruits voices from the beginning of the 20th century that evaluated this method as powerful for this purpose (Mortatti, 2019). The training content was designed and organized by researchers from Brazil, Portugal, Germany and the United States of America, who aimed to lead literacy teachers to think of the literacy curriculum along the lines of systematic phonics instruction.

The PNA dictates “new” senses and meanings for literacy as a skill based on the linguistic code and, consequently, imposes the curriculum for the literacy circle, privileging the contents and strategies anchored in systematic phonics instruction, interdicting the other possibilities of meaning: writing as a code; literacy as a coding/decoding skill; phonic method; focus on teaching the grapheme-phoneme relationship and the isolation of phonemes.

Literacy practices course: dictating and interdicting meanings in/by the official discourse

As the official discourse of the Tempo de Aprender Program, the Literacy Practices Course was the first training course aimed at literacy teachers within the scope of the PNA, proposed as an online course, with a duration of 30 hours and divided into six modules.

Suggested as a broad program, Tempo de Aprender envisaged at least four major sets of actions aimed at literacy, which in this discussion makes us look specifically at axis I - Continuing training for literacy professionals, and how it affects the imposed curriculum.

The Literacy Practices course initially made materials available on the Online Literacy Resource System (SORA) and was later organized into two volumes entitled “Literacy Practices: Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies” (Brasil, 2021a) and “Literacy Practices: Activity Book” (Brasil, 2021b).

The first volume [Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies] deals with the strategies that literacy teachers should implement. The content tells how to teach an object of knowledge, so that “[...] students learn, for example: that a word is made up of smaller parts, called syllables; that each letter expresses a sound; or that stories have a beginning, middle and end” (Brasil, 2021a, p. 17). The teacher is induced to follow the dynamics of the strategies imposed in the course’s bibliographic material, which are understood to be simple to implement. The teacher is instructed to follow four steps to achieve each of the literacy strategies: 1) first the teacher presents and demonstrates the content; 2) then they do the same process together with the students; 3) then, in groups, the students practice without the teacher’s help; and, 4) finally, they are given the opportunity to practice individually (Brasil, 2021a, p. 17).

This course, which is prescriptive in nature, is limited when talking about literacy teaching. It is only intended to be executable, not recontextualizable, which, according to the dialogue of Bakhtin’s Circle (2011; 2017) and Ball’s Policy Cycle (2001), is impossible. There is, therefore, a clear ideological reinforcement of the proposers in literacy practices, aiming to frame the literacy teacher’s actions.

Figure 1 shows the layout of one of the training strategies proposed in the Literacy Practices Course, revealing the relationship that the course sought to establish between the activities proposed by the Literacy Practices Course material and the skills of the National Common Core Curriculum - BNCC (Brasil, 2017):

Figure 1:
Teaching strategy: Sound recognition

The strategies proposed in the Literacy Practices course, in the “BNCC learning and development objectives” section, begin with an indication of the skills that the student should develop in that activity, “facilitating” the teacher’s planning and giving the notion of alignment with the curricular skills guided by the BNCC. This, therefore, is an ideological action to reinforce the given discourse, in an attempt to be less recreated as possible.

“Aligned” with the BNCC, the Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies (Brasil, 2021a) takes up each of the modules worked on in the Literacy Practices course, namely: Learning to listen, Alphabetic knowledge, Fluency in oral reading, Vocabulary expansion, Text comprehension and Writing production. These modules and strategies coincide/dialog with the six essential components for literacy advocated in the PNA Booklet (Brasil, 2019b).

The components listed above, which make up the literacy proposed in the PNA, are the result of what the working group set up to prepare it considered to be the most up-to-date scientific evidence, based on national and international reports that propose five components: phonemic awareness, systematic phonics instruction, oral reading fluency, vocabulary development and text comprehension, and are therefore words given (Bakhtin, 2017) by other countries which, in Brazil, have become created words. In this sense, by taking someone else’s word, the PNA proposers use the discourse of the most recent scientific evidence to introduce the sixth component [writing production] that strengthens the proposal, in this process of dialogical recontextualization.

The relationship between the modules of the Literacy Practices Course and, consequently, the Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies (Brasil, 2021a) with the essential components for literacy of the PNA (Brasil, 2019b) follows the order (module/component): Learning to listen/Phonemic awareness; Alphabetic knowledge/Systematic phonemic instruction; Fluency/Fluency in oral reading; Vocabulary/Vocabulary; Comprehension/Comprehension of texts, and Production of writing/Production of writing.

The relationship between the modules of the Literacy Practices Course and, consequently, of the Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies (Brasil, 2021a) with the essential components for literacy of the PNA (Brasil, 2019b) follows the order (module/component): Learning to listen/Phonemic awareness; Alphabetic knowledge/Systematic phonemic instruction; Fluency/Fluency in oral reading; Vocabulary/Vocabulary; Comprehension/Comprehension of texts and; Production of writing/Production of writing.

The first module, linked to the first essential component for literacy [learning to listen/phonemic awareness] set out by the PNA, guides the literacy teacher to work on: sound recognition; awareness of words, syllables, alliterations and rhymes; isolation, synthesis and segmentation of sounds. The Literacy Practices course/book argues that:

“Learning to Listen” refers to one of the most fundamental skills for children’s literacy. When we read, we recall an episode of speech, with its sounds, pauses and expressions. Reading science research shows that understanding the syllable, the word and its sounds accelerates learning to read and write (Brasil, 2021a, p. 16).

According to the need for students to be explicitly exposed to the letter/sound relationship in literacy, and to understand this relationship as stated above, there is a conflict with the meanings that are given or concealed, especially in the PNA discourse. Literacy has therefore become a disputed concept in the PNA, given the meanings that officially underlie it. This is because, in this module, phoneme isolation activities are proposed, as if this were a preponderant and decisive factor in the children’s literacy, when, in fact, it is yet another discursive-ideological resource defended within the PNA’s framework of valorization.

It is according to it Morais (2019) points out that phonemic awareness, which is part of phonological awareness, is not necessarily knowledge built up by children with consolidated literacy. Scientifically, Morais (2019) argues that, of the phonological awareness tasks presented to children, the ones that were least successful were phoneme counting and oral segmentation of words into phonemes. In other words, phonemic awareness is not an extremely important skill for children to become literate. However, there is no denying the importance of working on these skills in the literacy cycle - they are not an “essential component” for literacy.

In the second module, related to the second essential component for literacy in the PNA [alphabetic knowledge/systematic phonemic instruction], the proposed work revolves around alphabetic knowledge with a view to reading any word in Portuguese, including pseudo-words. To this end, it indicates ready-made workshops to be carried out by literacy teachers on naming letters, the letter-sound relationship, spelling rules, as well as reading words/phrases and creating words/pseudowords. Among the possible objections to this proposal is the inclusion of pseudowords in the literacy process, which distances it from the relationship between learning to write and its use in social practices, although scholars from other perspectives on the teaching and learning of writing consider this to be relevant.

In this module, it is argued that, in promoting systematic phonics instruction, when “[...] children already know that words are made up of sounds and learn to manipulate them, the next step towards literacy is to know the relationships between sounds and letters” (Brasil, 2021a, p. 71), which makes them perceive them in words and pseudo-words. The literacy teacher is warned: “To check that your students are decoding and not just guessing, you can introduce them to pseudo-words, i.e. words that can be pronounced in Portuguese but have no meaning, such as ‘mepo’ or ‘firte’” (ibid., p. 92). Activities of this kind, however, can lead students to perceive school writing as different from the writing of life, of social practices. In module three [Fluency/Fluency in oral reading] of the Literacy Practices Course/Book, fluency in oral reading is addressed using the indicators: reading a text with clear expression, shared reading, reading with a partner and individual reading. Fluency in oral reading is defined in the Literacy Practices Course/Book (Brasil, 2021a, p. 110) as “[...] the ability to read a text with speed, precision and prosody. Reading speed means recognizing words quickly. Accuracy is decoding words correctly. And prosody refers to proper intonation”.

It is necessary, however, to question which texts/genres are being privileged by the PNA’s proposers when working with reading fluency. Are there any discursive genres or is it just the reading of anecdotes? Are there genres or does reading decontextualized words and/or phrases prevail? The answer can be yes or no, as the proposal focuses mainly on words and isolated phrases, but also proposes some texts to develop oral reading fluency.

The limited number of suggestions for working with the proposed discourse genres is outstanding, as there are proposals for reading poems, stories, letters and personal narrative texts. Poems and anecdotes prevail, and it can be seen in the annex to the “Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies” (Brasil, 2021a) that, for each letter of the alphabet and each lesson on the spelling of the language, a poem and an anecdote are sent, as can be seen in Figure 2, the proposal for the presentation and memorization of the letters “A” and “Z”:

Figure 2:
Texts for literacy proposed in the Literacy Practices Course

The genres of discourse mentioned above, in the PNA, reveal an approximation with the text proposals indicated in the former books, especially when looking at the layout of the activities. Although the organization of these lessons, in the course/book annex, escapes the linearity of the alphabet, obeying the relationship of sound proximity between the phonemes represented by the letters of the alphabet. In this sense, the absence of real texts that relate to the social practices experienced by literacy learners reinforces the concept of literacy advocated by the policy, despite the deletion of the term literacy (letramento, in portuguese), in other words, the use of writing in social practices.

Module four [vocabulary] presents strategies detailing and completing sentences to identifying analytical categories based on these sentences, studying vocabulary and using context to understand words, as stated in the document:

[...] vocabulary refers to the set of words we know and use to communicate. In order to communicate effectively, we need to develop a good vocabulary. [...] Therefore, an effective stimulus for expanding vocabulary is to repeat new words, use them in different contexts and relate them to other words you already know (Brasil, 2021a, p. 137, emphasis added).

The proposed vocabulary development is relevant to be considered in the literacy process, as the child, by getting to know new words/vocabulary from their mother tongue, expands their value horizon, based on new ideological signs, and therefore expands their understanding of what they read/hear/practice.

The concept of discursive genre/text as a linguistic manifestation with intentionality and address, situated in a time and space (chronotope), by an active and responsive subject, in a context is effectively the conjuncture that surrounds (reflects and refracts) discursive eventfulness. The context of discourse production, therefore, goes beyond changing the structure (sentence/ utterance), as stated in the Literacy Practices Course. In this course, the proposal to use a few discursive events to expand the vocabulary of children in the literacy process is limited to exchanging homonymous words within a sentence: “This strategy uses context to expand vocabulary. To do this, we use homonyms [...]. Homonyms are only understood from a context, without which the listener will not know what they are about” (Brasil, 2021a, p. 170).

Module five [understanding/comprehension of texts] focuses on textual comprehension. To this end, it includes strategies for story retelling and oral expression, the identification of elements of the story and the main idea, as well as questions about the text, claiming that “[...] the strongest scientific evidence [...] shows that asking students questions during reading is effective. It is also important that students ask themselves about the text and think about it” (Brasil, 2021a, p. 177).

It also proposes identifying textual/discursive genres and details about the texts read/heard. The course/book states that “[...] comprehension is the ultimate goal of reading. It involves extracting meanings, identifying implicit and explicit messages, knowing the author’s intention and relating the text to information already known” (ibid., p. 177). It follows in giving guidance to literacy teachers:

Everyday contact with writing is important. For this reason, working with notices, invitations, poems, recipes, tickets, letters, among others, is an interesting way to familiarize children with the texts that surround them, so that they can also engage in their studies. In other words, your students should have contact with different textual genres. More related to form than content, genres will help students identify the structures of texts (Brasil, 2021a, p. 177, emphasis added).

The way in which the PNA does not treat textual/discursive genres differs from the way in which the discursive theory of language conceives genres as “[...] relatively stable types of utterances” (Bakhtin, 2011, p. 262). Therefore, by taking textual form as the main characteristic of a textual/discursive genre and focusing solely on its compositional structure, as seen in the aforementioned discursive fragment from the Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies (Brasil, 2021a), the multiformity that discursive genres take on in the complex discursive-social arena is disregarded. Therefore, the workshop/strategy proposed to literacy teachers, in the field of text comprehension, by focusing on the identification of discursive genres and privileging the personal letter, incurs two reductionisms: the first deals with a discursive genre that makes no sense to children today, since the personal letter is an obsolete discursive genre, having been transmuted into email; the second, the emphasis on compositional structure rather than content/theme, disregards the essence of the discursive relations of language and communicative purposes, given the interdiscursiveness.

The Literacy Practices Course reinforces that “[...] content is not enough to understand a text [...] you also need to know the form” (Brasil, 2021a, p. 208). However, it is understood that appropriating the compositional form of texts is important, but not essential when working with discursive genres. In this sense, the richness and diversity of discourse genres is infinite

[...] because the possibilities of the multiform human activity are inexhaustible and because in each field of this activity the repertoire of genres of discourse is integral, growing and differentiating as it develops and complexifies in a given field” (Bakhtin, 2011, p. 262).

In module six [writing production], the Literacy Practices Course/Book uses the following strategies for teachers: emergent writing, letter writing, word writing, word dictation, shared writing, writer’s workshop and independent writing. The synthetic orientation of these strategies starts from the smallest element (letter writing) to the largest (text production/history in independent writing). The reflections on this module dialogue with those on the previous modules, considering the discussion on discursive genres and the production of writing in a mechanical and decontextualized way.

Throughout the literature on which the PNA is based, there is no mention of the production of textual/discursive genres from the spheres in which literacy children circulate. Instead, the term “writing production” is used, which is not very comprehensive and is somewhat limiting, since writing in itself can even represent meaningless discursive sentences in the discursive events in which the children are being literate. In other words, the term “writing production” also refers only to writing words and sentences.

The PNA therefore defends writing as a code, in language structuralist terms:

Writing initially means to transit between the oral code - phonemes - and the written code - graphemes. In this chapter, we will work on emergent writing, writing and text writing. This last, more advanced skill requires the ability to gather ideas, structure texts and choose words (Brasil, 2021, p. 227).

In other words, written language is seen as a linear and scholastic activity based on the code. However, around language as a code, there is research and discussion that demystifies this structuralist concept, in view of literacy from a socio-interactionist perspective (Morais, 2014; Soares, 2020), which pay attention to the term Notational System to the detriment of Linguistic Code. This [the code] has been present in the discourse of researchers, especially linguists.

The authors point out that code, codify and decode are inappropriate terms when it comes to language and literacy from the perspective of alphabetizing, since language is not a code and literacy is not just codifying or decoding oral and written language, since the individual needs to have, in this process, a minimum of literate knowledge to act in social practices mediated by writing, that is, the social subject learns the written language while experiencing and using it socially. There are controversies in the understanding that the subject learns the language and then learns with the language, as stated in the PNA.

According to Prats and Martins Filho (2022), by ignoring students’ prior knowledge of written language, the PNA defends an adult-centered and associationist view of learning. In this sense, “[...] it makes explicit an organization of literacy that starts from the supposedly simplest to more complex stages, which disregards the literacy student in their interests, as well as reaffirming a banking logic of education in which it is up to the adult to transmit knowledge” (Prats; Martins Filho, 2022, p. 8) of a watertight and plastered curriculum.

This observation is reinforced in the sequence with the complete proposals in the book “Literacy Practices: Book of Activities” (Brasil, 2021b). It organizes each activity relating to the strategies as follows: it presents the objectives, lists the materials to be used, lists ideas for contextualization, describes the activity, indicates possible “adaptations” and, in the appendix, lists sounds to be worked on, in a well-defined script, as shown in Figure 3:

Figure 3:
Activity on the Teaching Strategy Learning to Listen.

Activity proposals such as the one mentioned above interdict the power of the teacher, seeking to hinder recontextualization actions by literacy teachers, as intended by the PNA. However, in practice, dialogic relationships mean that literacy teachers recontextualize what is imposed in the curriculum. Regarding the implications of the PNA, Almeida and Piatti (2021) observe the concealment of the protagonists of the literacy process, who are teachers and pupils, to the detriment of an ideology that is put in evidence.

Final considerations

This paper was written with the intention of analyzing the relationship between continuing education within the scope of the National Literacy Policy (PNA) and the imposed curriculum, thinking about the [inter]dictated dialogues that frame so many other discourses that go beyond the pretension of the single/unique word. Ultimately this materiality discursively analyzed the PNA’s Literacy Practices Course, looking at the discursive materialities “Literacy Practices: Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies” (Brasil, 2021a) and “Literacy Practices: Activity Book” (Brasil, 2021b).

To do so, we use the concepts of evaluative horizon, which characterizes the worldview, as well as the exotopic limits of the active-responsive subject; and the word of others, in the sense of the word given by others and when taken for oneself, by this subject, it becomes one’s own word in the movement of creation, recreation of living statements, which dialogues with what is called recontextualization in the field of educational policies, teacher training and literacy.

In this context, the dialogical relations between the imposed curriculum and the literacy teacher training policy in the PNA, the ruptures, silences, borrowings and contiguities that cross literacy curricula, enable changes and/or permanence. In the case of the PNA, it is intended to be imposed, under the discourse of alignment with the BNCC and simple/easy execution, as can be seen in the prescriptions of the works “Literacy Practices: Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies” (Brasil, 2021a) and “Literacy Practices: Activity Book” (Brasil, 2021b), which, in theory, aims to plaster teaching practice.

The analyses of “Literacy Practices: Literacy Teacher’s Book - Strategies” (Brasil, 2021a) and “Literacy Practices: Book of Activities” (Brasil, 2021b) lead us to conclude that, although this scenario of regression in literacy discourses, methods and curriculum may reflect on the curricular practices of literacy teachers, these, when dialoguing with the ideological signs that make up the PNA in defense of the discourse of innovation, scientific evidence and efficacy with regard to systematic phonics instruction and curricular prescription, can reconfigure them along the lines of the created word, their own word.

However, in the discursive-ideological attempt to dictate a discourse, interdicting others, the PNA therefore dictates the “new” senses and meanings for literacy as a skill based on the linguistic code and, consequently, imposes the curriculum for the literacy circle, privileging contents and strategies anchored in systematic phonics instruction. To do so, it interdicts the senses and meanings of literacy based on sociocultural bias, silencing literacy through the violence of the word. The Literacy Practices course is more than an indication that a discourse. It has a voice of authority and can be present crossing the official literacy curriculum and be reflected in the discourses and practices of literacy teachers, even during the recontextualization process.

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• FINANCIAL SUPPORT

  None.

• RESEARCH DATA AVAILABILITY

  Data is available on the Ministry of Education (MEC) website (https://alfabetizacao.mec.gov.br/images/pdf/livro-do-professor_03_09.pdf , ISBN: 978-65-87026-99-2 / https://alfabetizacao.mec.gov.br/images/pdf/livro-de-atividades.pdf )

Data availability

Data is available on the Ministry of Education (MEC) website (https://alfabetizacao.mec.gov.br/images/pdf/livro-do-professor_03_09.pdf , ISBN: 978-65-87026-99-2 / https://alfabetizacao.mec.gov.br/images/pdf/livro-de-atividades.pdf )

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  26 Aug 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  11 Oct 2023
• Accepted
  07 May 2024