Editor's note
It was a privilege for the editorial board to put together this RBLA thematic issue. This volume contains studies dedicated to literacy which are well executed and that generate urgent discussions. The reflections these articles provoke emphasize the need to rethink education so that it is truly inclusive, deals with a current and broad conception of the notion of literacy, is meaningful for the students and works with an approach in which the students are critical subjects who are active and participative in everyday situations, which always involve working with written or oral texts of the most varied genres, whether in print or digital format. In addition, it makes us feel the intense necessity for a school that breaks loose from traditional content-based approaches and essentially individual learning practices. In this sense, several articles show us the contributions that a real incorporation of the digital in these educative practices may bring so that we may have a school that develops not only the knowledge of sundry relevant content in students, but also important skills for their participation in contemporary society, such as the autonomy of learning and collaborative work, distributed and shared between many people.
This special volume is composed of 16 extremely thought-provoking articles, as I hope to show in the brief commentaries on them that I will make in due course and which are certainly not capable of reflecting the whole density and relevance of the discussions they prompt. This task will fall to the readers, who will certainly see the contribution of each of the texts to the discussion on literacy and, positively contaminated by them, will continue to elaborate these discussions in other networks. In this way, we may soon have advanced enough in the discussion of some problems to have found workable solutions to them.
In the text that opens this volume, Elizabeth Maria da Silva and Denise Lino de Araújo, based on the assumption shown by Street, that is, the uses and functions of literacy are not universal and that literate practices result from different contexts, show us how three approaches to literacy; the critical, the socio-pragmatic and the socio-rhetorical are not exclusive, but rather complete themselves, broadening and enriching the notion of literacy.
Denise Tamaê Borges Sato, Izabel Magalhães, José Ribamar Lopes Batista Júnior, concerned with a genuinely inclusive education, present the result of research performed over a period of five years in the Federal District, Goias, Ceará and Piauí in an attempt to analyze the discourses and practices of inclusive literacy and how they operate in the construction of educational identities. The results are worrying, as are those encountered by Michelle Donizeth Euzébio.
In the ethnographic study, she reports on in her article, Michelle presents troubling findings on school writing practices in a group of children in a neighborhood deemed socially vulnerable. Considering the school as an important agent of literacy, and understanding that there are varied literacies, that is, that in each culture there are various literacies related to different life situations, the author found a lack of alignment between the school and society. A school that is both unaware and dismissive of the literacy practices of its students.
In their research involving four-year-old children, Neilson Alves and Medeiros discuss, in an interesting manner, the role of language games in the development of oral textual genres, which in turn help to involve the child in literacy practices. It becomes clear from this work not only that language games are not restricted to those that are at the initial phase of language acquisition, but that these games serve as the basis for the learning and maintenance of textual genres throughout the life of these speakers.
The interpretation of texts is the focus of Cinara Monteiro Cortez. In this text, she claims not to provide answers or methods that guide educational practice regarding this theme, but rather proposes an approach to learning in which there is "a place for the deviation or alienation of interpretations" and in which the students may become involved and identify with. She reminds us that the separation between literary and linguistic studies into distinct areas does not mean that the two areas have many contributions to make to each other.
In a stimulating text, Marcelo Buzato shows us a vision of the notion of literacy from the perspective of the Actor-Network Theory and invites us to explore the potential of this theory in approaching literacy phenomena. We participate in heterogeneous networks, hence, diverse literacy events, often with performances that appear not to be part of the same person, if we start from a point of view stifled by subjectivity. Because of this, our subjectivity must be seen as an effect of our performances in the networks and not as something set and predetermined.
Regina Cláudia Pinheiro and Júlio César Araújo help us to rethink the concept of hyper-textual literacy showing us that to deal with texts in digital environments users need to make use of multiple literacies of which the processing of verbal and visual text and the establishment of a new relation between author-text-reader are a part. As these authors demonstrate, there is a junction of multiple literacies that may be perceived in the joint practices of various languages (multimodality).
This text is a good transition between this volume's articles. The first texts, which question and discuss digital literacy in a more contextual approach, but nevertheless also applied, and another set of texts that present us with a more practical view of this notion. For example, we have the text by Patrícia da Silva Campelo Costa and Eliseo Berni Reategui which seeks to answer the following question: how can a mining tool help us to develop reading and writing skills in a foreign language? These authors show how a graphic representation created from this tool helps students to identify specific characteristics of the texts and to create narratives such as fanfiction. This form of work promotes a literacy event that consists in meaningful, authentic writing shared on the web, also encouraging learner autonomy.
The question of teacher training in times of digital technology is the keynote of the article presented by Reinildes Dias. In a clear and didactic article, she shows us how work with the WebQuests can contribute to teachers' professional development, developing their capabilities relative to the multiliteracies. This training of multi-literate teachers can affect their educational practice so that they meet the demands of a society involved with digital technologies, thereby contributing to a more suitable preparation of their students for this reality.
The interesting case of a beer ad is analyzed by Cristiane Fuzer, Luciane Ticks and Sara Regina Scotta Cabral, who reveal the strategies used in the creation of this piece and how these choices affect the reader. As theoretical framework for these analyses, the authors chose Halliday's systemic functional theory and the studies of Kress and Van Leeuwen, who also use this same theoretical proposal. This text demonstrates forms of looking at texts that circulate in our society, guiding our view towards a critical reading of their verbal and non-verbal resources and their discursive functioning.
In a provocative text, Elzimar Goettenauer de Marins Costa helps us to reflect on teacher training. We need to find forms to make it so the theoretical-methodological conceptions presented in government documents have an effective repercussion on teacher training and, consequently, become the base of their work. The author pertinently points out the responsibility that the university must have in developing the digital and critical literacy of its students, future teachers, besides helping them to find ways to do this as professionals. Apart from these theoretical reflections, this article presents some practical examples of actions that may be carried out to incorporate the NITCs in the context of teaching/learning of foreign languages and which also apply to the teaching of the mother tongue.
Dealing with the auto-biographical reports of future teachers, Carla Lynn Reichmann tries to find out what enunciative voices these are and what they say about themselves and the school as agency of literacy. From this analysis, a conflict arises in which the school is sometimes seen as agency of literacy and other times not.
In an engaged and critical article, Paulo Rogério Stella and Roseanne Rocha Tavares discuss the need for educational projects to be reviewed so as to incorporate a notion of literacy aligned with the broader and more complex conceptions that this notion recently acquired, based on the analysis of the notion of literacy in the Licentiate Pedagogical Project in English, in the Federal University of Alagoas, Maceio.
A preoccupation with the practical application of the theory is the keynote of Nara Hiroko Takaki's text. The author presents and discusses her experience in an extension course, whose principal objective was to develop in the students - undergraduates from several areas - multiple capabilities and strategies for the reading of diverse types of textual genres. Reading was understood, in a critical literacies perspective, as a construction of ideological and political positioning and was worked in hybrid textual genres in a digital multimodal context. In this text, Nara shows us that new technological resources can favor learner autonomy and critical literacy, since students can practice the foreign language in different manners in communicative contexts in which they must act as engaged and questioning subject.
This discussion continues in Rogério Tílio's text, which focuses on the following question: has the foreign language class incorporated PCN (National Curriculum Parameters) discourses in relation to the approach to reading? To answer this, Rogério carefully analyses how reading is addressed in two English collections approved by the PNLD 2011 (National Textbook Program), having critical literacy as theoretical support for this analysis. The results indicate that we still have far to advance in this sense.
Maintaining the focus on the teaching of English, Marília Mendes Ferreira identifies and discusses the difficulties that a graduate student encounters when writing an academic article in English, leading us to reflect on the limits of language teaching that is based on working with textual genres which are currently so in vogue.
We have spoken at length about digital literacy, among other literacies, however, these intelligent and thought-provoking articles show us that there is still a lot to research and comprehend about the numerous phenomena that this notion involves and still further to go until we are capable of applying it to education in a full and satisfactory manner.
The editorial board of RBLA would like to thank all the authors, reviewers and colleagues involved in the preparation of this volume.
Carla Viana Coscarelli
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
22 Jan 2013 -
Date of issue
2012
