POETRY SLAM IN SPANISH LANGUAGE TEACHING: A PROPOSAL FOR CRITICAL LITERARY LITERACY

ABSTRACT

Poetry slam is an artistic and literary genre created in 1986, in the United States, which has been gaining supporters since its first play in Brazil, in 2008. As of 2015, Slam da Guilhermina, the second Brazilian group ever created, will now organize the Slam Interescolar SP, a spoken word poetry competition that has, over those years, already gathered hundreds of public schools from the City of São Paulo, with the participation of Elementary and High School students. By watching a few of those competitions, it is possible to observe its ability to mobilize the school community, which gathers around an expressive number of students willing to produce and share their poetry, through which they problematize a diverse range of issues, which makes the slam a strong ally in the process of raising civic awareness in those individuals. Based on such data, this paper presents a proposal for insertion of poetry slam from Spanish-speaking countries into Spanish Language classes, in order to develop a critical literary literacy (COSSON, 2009; STREET, 2014; DUBOC, 2014; MARINS-COSTA, 2016) and a teaching process anchored on intercultural (PARAQUETT, 2011, 2012; MATOS, 2018) and decolonial perspectives (QUIJANO, 2000; GROSFOGUEL, 2008; MATOS; SILVA JÚNIOR, 2019), encouraging higher engagement of students in reading practices. Since it is still a proposal, it is expected to be adaptable to different educational institutions offering that subject, respecting their respective particularities.

Keywords: poetry slam; Spanish teaching; literary literacy; interculturality; decoloniality