Writing and rewriting fictional narratives guided by Gianni Rodari’s creative proposals ^{1 2 3 4}

Abstract

Gianni Rodari (1982) presents consistent and entertaining alternatives for classroom textual production. Accordingly, an error is not a mistake to be corrected but a creative possibility of writing and rewriting. The objective of this action-research was to analyze the results of applying Rodarian proposals to the process of writing and rewriting fictional stories of 5th-grade students at a private school in Curitiba, Brazil. We conclude that the proposals efficiently formed literary readers and writers in elementary school.

Keywords
Literary literacy; Writing; Rewriting; Elementary school

Resumo

Gianni Rodari apresenta propostas lúdicas que se mostram alternativas consistentes para o desenvolvimento de produções textuais em sala de aula. Para o autor, o erro não é algo equivocado e a ser consertado, mas uma possibilidade criativa de escrita e reescrita. Nesta pesquisa-ação o objetivo é analisar os resultados da aplicação de algumas das propostas rodarianas no processo de escrita e reescrita das narrativas ficcionais dos estudantes de uma turma do 5.º ano, em um colégio particular do município de Curitiba. A pesquisa ressalta a eficácia da utilização dessas propostas e destaca-as como possibilidades na formação de leitores e escritores do literário já nos anos iniciais do Ensino Fundamental.

Palavras-chave
letramento literário; escrita; reescrita; Ensino Fundamental

Introduction

This article presents a research held in the scope of a Graduate program in Education. As a research-action, the work was conducted directly in the investigation context, applying Italian author Gianni Rodari’s proposals to a 5th-grade class when writing and rewriting fictional narrative texts.

The research field was a private school in Curitiba, state of Paraná, Brazil. The researched class was composed of 18 students between 9 and 10 years old who attended school full-time from 9:10 am to 5:35 pm. The first class was focused on studies and tasks. Every week from March until June 2022, two of those classes were used to implement the field research. The families and the students signed the informed consent forms. A researcher conducted the planned methodological procedures with the class's primary teacher.

In 2020, these students experienced a different 3^rd Grade attending online classes in remote education due to the Covid-19 pandemic. At this moment, the proposals for activities involving writing narrative texts were highly compromised, exactly when they were consolidating the writing acquisition processes. When resuming the in-person classes in 2021, in their 4^th Grade, a gap regarding text production was diagnosed. These students struggled with writing, handwriting, spelling, and record organization in the notebook and activity papers. During the 2021 school year, the process of writing fictional narratives could be resumed, though with limitations. Considering this scenario, we believed that these students would be more prepared to participate in creative and ludic proposals of writing and rewriting during their 5^th Grade in 2022.

The research started with a diagnostic phase by reading the theoretical grounds of Portuguese described in the school’s political-pedagogical project and class plans for the subject in the 4^th Grade in 2021. These served as a base to create the plans for the beginning of the 5^th Grade in 2022. Besides this, it was essential to analyze other actions systematized in the school that stimulated reading, such as a Book Club with weekly meetings with a teacher specialized in childhood literature – who developed several reading proposals from books and videos previously defined in her plans.

We also interviewed the other teachers from this class to raise information on their pedagogical pathways, proposals, challenges, weaknesses, and strong points. We applied a questionnaire to the students to identify their literary repertoire, preferences, tastes, resistances, and motivations.

Furthermore, we used a field diary to record details to analyze the research context and process. It is a research instrument with particular dimensions and, in this sense, establishes an active participant observation, with data to follow the processes and, later, to act effectively (Barbier, 2007).

Based on the data collection, readings, interviews, questionnaires, and notes, we created an action plan, as Tripp (2005) proposed, aiming to be with the students and implement activities that recovered their literary repertoire, proposing and following the writing and rewriting processes. As it was a research-action, this plan was constantly reshaped based on the active participant observation.

After the end of the field research, all the material was carefully read to produce a report that went beyond the simple data description, “seeking to really add something to the pre-existent discussion on the topic” (Lüdke & André, 2020, p. 58). Therefore, an effort was made to relate the data collected to the existing theoretical grounding, contributing to new reflections on the theme studied. This article presents a synthesis of this study.

Ludic pathways to stimulate children’s literary writing and rewriting

The school aims to develop literary competence through literary language, understanding it as the formation of a repertoire of texts and reading and writing practices of literary texts. When the students master the textual structure and know the narrative and plot elements, they can create more sequenced narratives.

Children need to be incentivized to read and playfully guided in the writing process to develop the writing of a literary text. We understand the practice of a textual writing as a process that involves different phases, starting by the theme choice. The phases contribute to the development of text awareness and, consequently, language itself. Teachers need to build with the students a process of production that starts with planning the texts, writing, reviewing, and rewriting. This process is essential and can be continuous because text production is a social practice with a communication role: Why does one write? Who will be the reader of this text?

Lerner (2002) approaches the importance of writing from the text planning until the final review, which guarantees the reflection and quality of the text. The author affirms that “through successive reviews of what was written and the reflection on the relations between what was already written and what will be written, one tries to guarantee the coherence of the text” (Lerner, 2002, p. 85).

This perspective is associated with drafts and text review and is not limited to simple grammatical and spelling corrections. The idea of a creative correction process or considering the mistake as one more bridge to creativity emerges from the need to trigger a reflection on teachers' corrections. Through playfulness, the writing and rewriting processes can become pleasant and meaningful to children, highlighting the production quality instead of the quantity.

Rodari (1982), in his work The Grammar of Fantasy – published in Italy in 1973 and in Brazil in 1982 – emphasizes that children's imagination should be stimulated through the free use of all language possibilities so that, as full beings, they can creatively intervene in society. Therefore, imagination should be as important in schools as attention and memory abilities.

In this direction, Amorim (2009), reflecting on Rodari’s work, proposes adding imagination to the students' interest in the studied theme, creating a more fruitful experience. He continues with an example for children in the Brazilian context:

Thus, as important as being careful with the narrative of Brazil's discovery and apprehending the historical opinions on the event, the student needs to be on board with Cabral, beside Caminha, whispering in his ear a beautiful phrase for the letter to King D. Manuel, or to be at the beach hidden with the Indigenous, ready to defend Pindorama⁵.

(Amorim, 2009, p. 1)

To Amorim, from this thought emerges the need to see the teacher also as a promoter of creativity, open to creative mistakes, because educating is a game and we can know children through the language of playing.

Using play as language, Rodari invites us to propose creative activities to reinvent (hi)stories and words, transforming creation into a game that expands ideas and develops abilities. One of Rodari’s (1982) greatest legacies is accepting mistakes as part of learning. He comments: "Many children's 'mistakes' are not mistakes: they are autonomous creations which children use to assimilate an unknown reality”(p. 37). Besides considering the grammatical mistake as a possibility to insert a new fantastic element in the narrative of a child, in the author's conception, there is also the proposal of working with traditional narratives and intentionally mistaking them. An evil Little Red Riding Hood and a nice wolf, a bad Cinderella with a patient stepmother. As Rodari states, “the technique of mistake starts, then, to have a guidance, a project. A product that will be partially or totally new, depending on the 'inversion' to one or all elements of the given fable" (p. 60). This technique of altering traditionally known characters is present in some works by national authors, such as Chapeuzinhos Coloridos [Colorful Riding Hoods] (Torero & Pimenta, 2016) or Chapeuzinho Amarelo [Yellow Riding Hood] (Buarque, 2017).

In writing, a grammatical mistake can be the key to a new narrative, creating a new character and scenario. Each mistake has on itself the seed for a new creation. Giving examples, Rodari (1982) questions: “A ‘shotfun’ with an ‘f’ instead of ‘g’, shoots bullets, feathers, or violets?” (p. 38).

From the perspective of divergent thought, making mistakes when creating stories is an excellent generator of creation and creativity Rodari (1982) states that

creativity is synonymous with 'divergent thought', that is, the capacity to continuously break the experience schemes. It is 'creative' a mind that works, that always makes questions, that finds problems where others find satisfactory answers (in the security of situations where one should smell danger), that can be autonomous and independent (from the father, the teacher, society), that refuses what is coded, that re-manages objects and concepts without letting itself be inhibited by conformity. All these qualities are manifested in the creative process. (p. 164)

By using creativity and stimulating divergent thought, teachers can be motivated to implement Rodari’s proposals with children and observe the creative power they can provide to the student-authors. The proposals suggest creating short stories from a word, an object, or a toy, establishing coherence without using pronouns and articles. Alternatively, creating non-conventional words by using a prefix. Or, even, the merging of nouns that seem completely unrelated – the fantastic binomial –, but that can, through imagination, emerge as unexpected elements in the narrative. They also include the continuation of hypothetical stories or even the mixture of classical characters with other characteristics. These proposals use the classic repertoire of childhood literature known by many children, stories told by family members or in school, or watched in videos, such as Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Pinocchio, among others.

Rodari not only explored the richness of literature but also shows how to incentivize writing as creativity and imagination, particular to children, because he affirms that, with a single word, we can get many mistakes, that is, many stories. The author organized a series of stimuli for writing, imagination, and creativity, presenting several possibilities for playing with works, producing narratives, and similar thoughts that emerge from children's experiences, repertoires, and their relationship with other stories and words. The author's reflection challenges teachers' views on reading and correcting a child's text.

Rewriting a text is one of the phases that gives meaning to text production and brings important reflections about the plot elements, types of conflict and scenarios, and characters' descriptions, mainly if it is a fictional text.

Therefore, teachers' posture when facing the concept of a student-authorr can no longer be of a simple checker. Teachers should also know how to motivate, lead, and value the aesthetic creation present in children's writing. In this case, we should consider the need of a teacher-writer for a student-author.

Hence, when incentivizing writing, teachers' intervention should not be purely technical, focused on grammar, which can remove from children the delight for the materialization of their imagination and creativity, expressed in their texts. In this process, Gusso and Dalla-Bona (2014) continue:

Much more than solving grammatical or spelling problems, rewriting a fictional text shows to the student-author, for example, that certain information on the text needs to be more detailed or expanded to reach the intended meaning; that the reordering of text segments can contribute for a clearer and more coherent flow of the story; that certain information, which does not contribute to the plot unfolding, should be removed; that certain parts need to be substituted to reach the aimed project; that a specific lexical choice would be more fruitful for polysemic effects. (p. 73)

The authors highlight written production as a process that improves itself with teachers' reviews and the student-author's rewrites. This process of successive reviews and rewritings in the classroom must be ludic and motivating, so the students can perceive reviews as possibilities to polish their creations and ideas. Besides this, it is also important for the author to have an interlocutor. At first, this will be the teacher, but later, this role can also be played by other student-authors in the class so as to create collective and peer motivation.

Cerrillo (2008) coments:

the development of literary creativity in children is possible if they are stimulated to write about their own experiences, about thrilling and exciting episodes, about all they can express with their capabilities, not only what they did not think or thought lightly, or about what they cannot express with their linguistic knowledge… All this allows for a progressive formation of literary creation. Adults should restrict themselves to providing the necessary stimuli and adequate material. (p. 181)

On placing on the adult, the teacher, the responsibility for the necessary stimuli and the adequate materials to expand reading and writing competencies, Cerrillo emphasizes the need to develop a creative position with children when raising on them different forms to express their personal experience.

About rewriting, Barbeiro (2020) analyzes the relationship between reading and writing through rewriting. In his opinion, “rewriting is a strategy that focuses on the choices to reach socio-communication objectives better" (pp. 3). For the author, the corrections centered on words are a zoom-in movement (focal view), and corrections focused on broadening the narrative are a movement of zoom-out (broad view). Considering these movements, zoom-in can be related to the proposal of creative mistakes presented by Rodari (1982). Indicating a grammatical mistake in the writing of a word in the text can, through certain teachers' questions, lead to reflection on writing and create new possibilities in the narrative.

Barbeiro’s (2020) research also reminds Rodari’s proposal called recasting fairy tales. In this proposal, Rodari suggests the structure of a story well-known by the children and asks them to insert other characters and situations. For this game, Rodari (1982) explains:

A fairy tale can be reduced to the bare plot of its events and their internal relations. Cinderella lives with her stepmother and stepsisters who go to a grand ball and leave her at home. Through the intervention of a fairy, she, too, goes to the ball. The prince falls in love with her. Et cetera.

The second step consists in reducing the plot to a pure abstract expression:

A lives in the house of B and stands in a relationship to B, different from the relationship that C and D have with B. While B, C, and D go to E, where there is some kind of event F, A remains alone. However, thanks to the intervention of G, A, too is able to go to E and makes an extraordinary impression on H. Et cetera. (pp. 67-68)

É possível perceber nessa proposta que a criança não precisa dominar a estrutura formal de uma narrativa, mas, a partir do exercício de alterar personagens e situações em uma narrativa pronta, ela pode ir se apropriando dessa estrutura enquanto desenvolve a imaginação. As Rodari (1982) says “the essential moment of the “recasting” is the analysis of the given fairy tale. It is a process that is at once analytical and synthetic, and it goes from the concrete to the abstract, and from the abstract it turns to the concrete.” (p. 70).

However, between this writing and rewriting, there is a text review through the eyes of the teacher and the classmates, which, in this case, allows students to consider themselves able to be reviewers.

In the case of the teachers’ gaze, Costa Val et al. (2009) highlight their uncomfortable mission as reader-evaluators, as they deal with various subjectivities, which will demand their sensibility to not demotivate their student-authors. The authors highlight that

evaluating a text involves a good strategy of interpretative reading, which requires a willing and cooperative reader to join the interlocution game. Cooperation does not mean passiveness but openness, not simply to accept but to join the proposed game, recovering clues and producing meaning.

(Costa Val et al., 2009, p. 86)

The quote is related to the proposal of creative mistake described by Rodari (1982) as it places the evaluator's reading as an attitude of those joining the game, that is, those who also participate in the process, feed, and are fed by the interaction with the text, finding clues and producing meaning.

Considering Rodari’s proposals, the idea is also to play with students' mistakes while writing, provoking ideas and contributing to expand the story. This type of intervention rarely takes place in school, which motivated the challenge to apply it and reflect on its effects on children's narratives. Hence, as ludic processes, some of Rodari’s proposals were the main references for this action-research.

Experiencing Rodari’s proposals in literary writing and rewriting processes

The goal was for 5^th- Grade students to create a textual production of a fictional narrative grounded on literary works and on Gianni Rodari’s writing proposals: the Arbitrary Prefix, the Fantastic Binomial, What would happen if… (fantastic hypothesis), Making Mistakes in the Story, and What Happens After? The proposal of creative mistake is used in the text review.

The planning was structured according to Cosson’s (2020) expanded sequence, which has seven phases: motivation, introduction, reading, first interpretation, contextualization, second interpretation, and expansion.

Before starting the motivation phase, students received a writer’s notebook, as Tauveron (2014) suggests – a notebook in which they could record their readings, notes on book titles, catchphrases, and the different text versions. It was a memory support from all they read, saw, and listened everyday, which can be used as inspiration for stories, a practice used by great authors, such as Guimarães Rosa.

The first phase – motivation – considered the students’ taste for Harry Potter⁶ stories and the fantastic objects and elements in these narratives. To help in the discussion, we showed short extract of videos in which the invisibility cloak (McGonagall, 2012) and the Knight bus (Solid, 2021) appear in the Harry Potter stories. Thus, during the classes, the students could remember other various objects and fantastic elements, such as the wardrobe from The Chronicles of Narnia (Lewis, 2009) or the sweets garden and the elevator that goes in all directions, both from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Dahl, 2005). Afterward, some questions were posed to the students: How would it be to enter a crazy bus like the Knight bus? What would you do if you had an invisibility cloak?

These questions helped them to free themselves, share their ideas, and record them in their writers’ notebooks: “Based on what we discussed today, imagine and create a fantastic object that you would like to have in our story. Explain how it works and draw it, so your classmates can see it”.

Some interesting creations came out, such as a magic library with a hidden passage leading to a literary world where the book characters live. In this specific creation, the student stood out by her descriptions, as she started with a short story to explain it. Nonetheless, it was noticeable that students needed more experiences to create and describe fantastic objects. Due to this need, we introduced Gianni Rodari’s Arbitrary Prefix and Fantastic Binomial.

In Rodari’s (1982) proposal of an arbitrary prefix, the author says that “one way of making words productive in a fantastic sense is by deforming them” (p. 33). Therefore, the proposal is to use prefixes and their meanings to create new meanings to previously existing words. The author continues to rely on the creative game to affirm that

it is sufficient to employ the prefix de- to transform the word sharpener- an everyday and negligible object, moreover dangerous and offensive – into a “desharpener”, a fantastic and peaceful object. It is used not to shapen pencils, but to allow the points of the pencils to grow back by themselves when they have become dull. Of course, this would enrage the owners of stationery stores and the ideological champions of consumerism

(Rodari, 1982, p. 33)

Using this proposal, the students played with the words after understanding what a prefix was and its practical use in writing words. One of Rodari’s stories that helped to exemplify it was “The Country with the Un in the Front” from the work Telephone Tales (Rodari, 2018), read by the researcher to the students, which helped them understand the proposal. After, they created words as “triwallet” (a wallet that triples the money it keeps), “hexadog” (a six-legged dog), and a “polichair” (a chair in which one can sit in any possible way).

In the Fantastic Binomial proposal, inspired by Paul Klee and his idea of concept binomial, Rodari (1982) defends that "in the 'fantastic binomial," the words are not taken in their daily meaning, but freed from the verbal chains that hold them together on a daily basis" (p. 22). Therefore, we called students in pairs; each person should say any noun and then merge them. The apparently non-sense combination creates a fantastic binomial that can be explained later. At first, with the researcher’s oral mediation, the students seemed to understand the game and the unusual possibility of creating characters. However, afterward, when registering the binomial, some noun merges appeared, such as “donkey + unicorn = doncorn” [in Portuguese, burro + unicórnio = burnio]. The non-use of Rodari’s proposal does not take away from the students the exercise of imagination when merging nouns to create a new one, which shows the potential to play with words.

Continuing the expanded sequence, after the motivation, there were the introduction and reading phases, moments in which the writer and his work were presented to the class. The writer presented, on writing, a brief biography of Gianni Rodari and some of his works. The students were invited to listen to the book O trólebus 75 [Trolly Number 75] (Rodari, 2013), which relates to the idea of Harry Potter's Knight Bus and highlights one of Rodari’s proposals: What would happen if…(fantastic hypothesis).

The proposal of fantastic hypothesis appears from the reflection of ‘what would happen if’. Rodari (1982) starts explaining this proposal by saying:

What would happen if, upon wakening, a main found himself changed into a filthy cockroach? The answer to this question can be found in Franz Kafka’s story “The Metamorphosis”. Of course, it was not this question that produced the story, but the form of the narrative certainly assumes the development of a pure fantastic hypothesis, including its tragic consequence. (p. 28)

The researcher read the Trolley Number 75 (Rodari, 2013) to the students in a circle. After reading it, there was a first interpretation based on the Dime approach (Chambers, 2007), and some questions were asked so that students could express themselves orally. They explored the story's details and established relations with people's routines in large cities.

After the reading, it was interesting that the students noticed that the work's language was simpler and more appropriate for younger students. Thus, the researcher could resignify the target audience – 3rd- grade students – of their created narrative. In this sense, reading and reflecting on the book's language helped them illustrate its adequacy to the reader and plan a first text production from a fantastic hypothesis.

Based on the creation of their fantastic hypothesis, each student could start to plan their texts in the following phase of the expanded sequence, called first interpretation. A rehearsal was proposed in this phase: creating a text by rescuing the writing proposals they experienced in previous years. Therefore, after checking the activities from other years, the researcher organized a material quite similar to the one they had used at the end of the 4^th Grade to plan a text. They had to consider the title, the characters, and the plot elements: initial situation, conflict, climax, outcomes, and resolution. So, students created the first version of their texts, following a guide and helped by the researcher and the main teacher.

Continuing the expanded sequence, the first textual production is followed by the contextualization phase. This phase aims to understand the work in its creation context. Thus, there is an unlimited number of contextualizations to be made. In this case, a theoretical contextualization was used to explain the ideas that support the work or were enacted on it; the historical one, which characterizes the time and the culture it presents; the critic, which deals with the reception of the literary text, the criticisms made; the ‘presentifier’ that relates the theme with the present; and the theme, which discusses the theme approached in the work.

For the contextualization phase, the narrative "Pinocchio, the Clever" from the work Stories to Play (Rodari, 2009). This story is part of the prompt What happens after, when Rodari (1982) explains that “even when a fairy tale is finished, there is always the possibility of an “after””. (p. 62). Yes, that is what we can see in the successful movies. Rodari continues: “The characters are ready to act. We know how they relate to one another. The simple introduction of a new element sets the entire internal mechanism in motion once again, as all those writers who have written or conceived a sequel to Pinocchio certainly know” (p. 62).

Rodari uses the story of a certain Pinocchio, not the same from the original story we know, to create another plot in which this Pinocchio gets rich by making furniture out of his own nose. The proposal inserts the possibility of different story ends to be chosen by the readers after reflecting about the character's behavior and the plot elements to justify their choices.

After reading and discussing the main ideas about the narrative, it was interesting to observe that only some students knew the original Pinnochio story. Consequently, there needed to be a moment to know the story of the puppet Pinocchio from a short video (Bedtime Stories Collection, 2015). Only then could students understand the intention of the proposal. In the classroom and using a notebook, students received a written text and the three ends proposed by the author. Each student should silently read the ends, choose their favorite, and explain their choice to their classmates. From the objective proposed by this contextualization phase, the story was explored orally – they discussed the poetic contextualization, reflecting on the characters in the original and Rodari’s adapted version; its historical contextualization, considering the social and economic issues brought by the narrative; its ‘presentifing' contextualization, relating the Italian puppet and the Brazilian doll Emilia⁷. This phase explores the work, raises explicit and implicit information in the text, allowing students to establish endless relationships, developing reading abilities and, thus, contributing to the formation of a critical and creative reader.

After the contextualization phase, a second interpretation aimed to lead the reader towards a deeper initial interpretation. In this phase, a final record is important, highlighting the deepening of the class's reading and resulting in a common knowledge that unites the class on the same reading horizon. At this moment, the students made a text using as references the works they read by Rodari and their own creations.

Along the contextualization phase, the last phase of the expanded sequence was implemented, the expansion phase. This phase aims to invest in textual relationships, regarding intertextuality and relating what was read – in this case, Rodari’s work – with other works. Here, it was possible to relate the story "Pinocchio, the Clever" with Emilia. Hence, from this relationship, there would be a possibility of implementing one more expanded sequence in another literary project with Monteiro Lobato’s works. Besides this, the expansion phase is also the moment to present the outcomes of the literary pathway taken. After due reviews and rewriting processes, students' literary creations were published as books, using a digital platform called Estante Mágica [Magic Shelf]. This platform allowed the printing of a book for each student, with their story and illustrations, highlighting the student as a writer. There was a book signing with the participation of the families when the books arrived at the school to value the students and their productions even more.

Reflecting on the review and rewriting processes, the researcher made the first reading after the first writing of the texts. At this time, it was interesting to take the role as a co-author of students' texts and not as an evaluator. As co-author, the reading was initially read as a whole to understand the student-author intention; after that, some observations were added to the text, as students sought to insert in their text sound effects and other possible effects reached through the intentional use of punctuation marks, such as ellipsis.

The way of making the observations in the texts was based on Ruiz’s (2020) studies: indicative corrections were used, which consists in indicating students' mistakes by using some signs; the resolution correction in which, differently from the indicative, the teacher points out the mistake and corrects it, then the student should only rewrite the text based on the resolutions the teacher created; and the textual-interactive correction characterized by the insertion of messages (notes) to the student-author, establishing a dialogue between the reader and the writer. Some students answered the researcher by writing.

While reading some texts, it was possible to use the creative mistake proposal in some works. To Rodari (1982), the concept of mistake provides a different way of looking at the children’s text and their word formulation and writing. For the author, mistakes can reveal hidden truths, and invention comes from making mistakes – this was evident in the writing of the words “cacha”[bok], instead of “caixa”[box]; and “brucha”[whitch], instead of “bruxa” [witch]. In these cases, the creative intervention needs to consider the text's plot to promote possibilities to play with words, thus, suggesting the author to expand the narrative.

When returning the corrected texts to the students, it was possible to explain the type of intervention done in the text.

They had fun with how cacha and brucha were resignified in their classmates’ texts. First, the researcher asked, collectively, what was the correct spelling of “caixa”. The students spelled it and the researcher wrote it on the blackboard. After, the researcher wrote the work as it appeared in the text and offered the meaning possibilities considering the story. Orally, the researchers played with the spelling of the word, a cacha because it is a magic box, the box of a monster that makes a different noise when opening. Hence, the researcher could show students the possibility of having a different object in the story – but that, for this to happen, a description should be needed in the text, expanding the narrative. The researcher did the same with the word “bruxa”. The students gave some other meanings, for instance, that she is a brucha with “ch” because she is the queen of chás [teas].

Following the researcher's review, she returned the text to the students with observations that could help them continue their writing, without grading concerns. It was also important to remind that they were creating stories to be read by 3^rd-grade students.

Based on students’ first text production, in the return of the first review made by the researcher and the experiences proposed by reading Rodari’s stories and prompts, students created their narratives. To promote the exchange of experiences about these productions, the researcher and the main teacher proposed a circle to read the narratives in the making. Each student could show their project to receive spontaneous suggestions from their classmates:⁸

• Substitute the word ‘he’, there are many ‘he’ in the text.

• Describe the parallel passage to the inverse world.

• Describe the portal.

• Substitute the word “so”.

• Describe the reverse word and the dog’s role in your story.

• Remove the part that describes the suns and the moons because they are very long and explain better what the Minions do in your story.

• Describe the situation in which the character uses the firepower. Is she a villain or a heroine?

• Where did she see the spaceship?

• Substitute the repeated words in your text and explain better how the character became powerful and a king.

During this sharing process, it was also possible to see inspirations from movies and other fictional narratives, such as Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Rowling, 2017).

As student-authors, they threw themselves into the creation of their stories. At this moment, the students' excitement to write was clear. Passarelli (2012) points out that this is a characteristic of children's thinking. They think the work while doing and simply write, which is different from an experienced author who rereads and rewrites many times. Santos and Barrera (2019) also highlight that planning is the most complex phase of the text, and inexperienced writers cannot always satisfactorily implement this phase.

The lack of grades was also a determinant factor for students' more motivated writing, this was even noticed by the main teacher. We opted to use a guide or table of criteria, shown in Figure 1, previously known by students. However, the text production was not limited by its items.

Figure 1
Guide/ Table of Criteria

Axis / Criteria		R	PR	NR
1. Structure and elements of the narrative text	Presentation of characters, scenario, and initial situation
	Obs.:
	Succession of events interconnected, presenting a conflict and a resolution.
	Obs.:
2.Cohesion and coherence	Organizes the ideas into paragraphs.
	Obs.:
	Uses the main punctuation marks already systematized (period, dash, exclamation and question marks).
	Obs.:
	Substitutes repetitive words.
	Obs.:
3.Creativity	Uses Rodarian resources to create words, characters, and situations.
	Obs.:
4.Review and rewrite	Revises writing and uses spelling rules and agreements already systematized.
	Obs.:
	Adds information from the review of the classmates and the teacher.
	Obs.:

• Note: R – Reached / PR – Partially reached / NR – Not Reached

Students received a table of criteria and, with their texts at hand, conducted a self-evaluation of the structural elements that characterize the genre, the linguistic aspects of the text, and its general quality as communication. Besides this, with this intention, the reflection on the text can occur in different phases of the production process, during its creation or after the first version. In this research, the self-evaluation occurred at the end of the last written version handed to the researchers. After the self-evaluation, the researcher reviewed the texts and used the same criteria.

Text rewriting is part of text production and in this phase classmates and teachers exchanged ideas. In the sharing between the peers, the researcher and the main teacher could contribute with questions to help them reflect on the changes to be made in a collaborative writing process.

Considering the studies of Spinillo and Lucena (2019), review affects over the form and the content, demanding a partnership between teachers and students, moving away from a simplistic idea that revising is simply correcting. Besides that, the authors reinforce that

text review is the bond between text production and reading, as the review demands the writer to also be a reader. This displacement of roles facing the text is key in forming competent writers.

(Spinillo & Lucena, 2019, p. 98)

According to this quote, Spinillo and Lucena reinforce in their studies the development of a students’ meta-textual condition in the review process because the students consider the text an object of reflection and analysis and in a movement of retroaction develop themselves as readers and writers.

In the research implementation, it was possible to see that this phase is always more delicate because it involves interfering in the creation process of student-authors as written or oral observations, which the students do not always know how to consider. Therefore, besides pointing out the corrections and making observations, it is essential to reflect with the student about how to consider them in their productions.

When the review is the correction of words, the insertion or suppression of punctuation marks, paragraphs, or rewriting, in most cases, students solve what is identified. However, the situation is different when there is the need to broaden, describe, or even better develop an idea in the text. During the collaborative peer exchanges, several students noticed the repetition of words in the classmates’ stories and this was the correction most accepted by students-writers.

The analysis of the review demonstrates the need to invest more time in this phase and also use creative proposals of reflection about the material read by students, allowing re-writings that really broaden and improve their texts. When creating fictional narratives, it is important to consider that this text, from the contribution of classmates and teachers as co-authors, increases in size and details, which can lead to student frustration when noticing that they will have to rewrite the full text manually.

Only after the review moments, the students first rewrote their narratives. With the texts in hand, the researchers reread them and made more observations that were returned for students-writers' evaluation. However, they now typed them, which raised another motivation to continue creating their texts.

Thus, revising and rewriting are part of the textual production and also from a formative conception of evaluation because information is gathered through the joint view of the student and the teacher. The student can follow and assume responsibilities for their learning in a formative and collaborative perspective of text production.

Conclusions

We conclude that the more reading, the greater the literary and vocabulary repertoire, as well as the student's condition to think, reflect, and write. Offering children ludic tools for writing, as proposed by Rodari (1982), can make them more motivated to write, communicate through writing, and express themselves.

Considering the proposal of the school where the research was conducted, teachers' planning, and the data collected with students and teachers, the knowledge of Rodari’s work and the use of his reading and writing proposals were fruitful to develop students’ imagination and literary creativity because, from their experience, they were motivated to write, free to image and create characters and scenarios for their fictional narratives – which was also possible by the fact of not having a qualitative evaluation of their written production. The research shows possibilities of a more qualitative process for fictional narratives, using a more collaborative perspective between students and teachers from criteria and observations that allow reflections about the text.

The proposal for the more experienced student-authors (5th Grade) to write to the beginners (3^rd Grade) was efficient to define an interlocutor beyond the teacher, stimulating students to increasingly improve the narratives created.

The sequence expanded by Cosson (2020) was an adequate choice to promote literary literacy because, as shown in its implementation, it works as a guiding thread for students’ literary pathway and helped in the choice of Rodari’s work, as well as in the proposals for story creation. In the contextualization phase, it was possible to develop students' more critical views regarding the socio-historical issues in his work and relate them with current social aspects, leading to an oral discussion about the history and geography contents they were studying. It would have been important to have more time to explore this phase, as we could have deepened into the author's work and his perspective of the world and of art. It evidences the implicit in the text and the possibilities to dialogue with several types of knowledge beyond the literary one.

The research also showed the need to provide teachers with a theoretical-practical grounding regarding the review and rewriting process. Spinillo and Lucena’s studies (2019), highlighting metalinguistic and meta-textual abilities, and Ruiz (2020), pm the textual-interactive corrections, present essential data and reflections about students' written production and the processes undertaken, contributing to the formation of students-authors.

Perceiving the student as a student-author and placing the teacher as a co-author in this creation is also a necessary paradigm change to follow the learning of text writing. The concept of student-author proposed by Tauveron (2014) presents itself as an innovative concept for students’ protagonism in their text production. To do so, using a writers' notebook was a key resource, a record support, a repository of ideas that helped students during their creation process. Besides this, the notebook was also a rich analysis material to understand students' writing process. It can be improved and used as a resource for a qualitative evaluation of students' learning.

• 2
  References correction and bibliographic normalization services: Andréa de Freitas Ianni [e-mail]
• 3
  Funding: CAPES (PROEX/PPGE-UFPR - Programas de excelência Notas 6 e 7).
• 4
  English version: Viviane Ramos [e-mail]
• 5
  Translation note (T.N): “Caminha” refers to Pero Vaz de Caminha, a Portuguese noble who accompanied Pedro Álvares Cabral on his arrival to Brazil. He was responsible for writing a letter to the Portuguese king (Dom Manuel I) describing the new land, called Pindorama in the Tupi Indigenous language.
• 6
  Series of seven fantasy novels written by J. K. Rowling between 1998 and 2007.
• 7
  T.N.: Emilia is a famous character of Brazilian children’s literature written by Monteiro Lobato. She is a ragged doll that comes into life after taking a magic pill.
• 8
  The suggestions were collectively written. They were suggested after students read their narratives. Therefore, we do not present students’ initials here.

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1

Responsible editor: Silvio Gallo https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2221-5160

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  01 July 2024
• Date of issue
  2024

History

• Received
  08 Feb 2022
• Accepted
  19 Sept 2023