ABSTRACT
This article presents the results of the research study, “Literacies in rural communities: social practices of reading and writing in school and non-school situations”, conducted from 2015 to 2017. This study investigated how forms of sociability and communicative circuits in the daily lives of the rural youth constitute social practices of reading and writing. Initially, the use of the word “literacies” in the plural is justified. The context for this research is the Araçuaí Family Agroecological School in Vale do Jequitinhonha, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Analyses are based in the New Literacy Studies (STREET, 2014STREET, B. (2014). Letramentos sociais: abordagens críticas do letramento no desenvolvimento, na etnografia e na educação. São Paulo: Parábola Editorial.) and the methodology assumes a qualitative approach from an ethnographic perspective (HEATH; STREET, 2008HEATH, S. B.; STREET, B. V. (2008). On Ethnography. Columbia: Teachers College Columbia.) in which students collaborated in the production of videos with themes related to their communities. Video production was adopted as a methodological strategy to achieve literacies involved in the collective actions of the process. The results show that the use/non-use of digital technologies does not stand as a factor of differentiation between rural youth and urban youth, definitively breaking with the idea that rural communities are social spaces that lack literacy practices or that are disconnected from the virtual world, which shows that schools should broaden their concepts of literacy, not only by pluralizing practices, but mainly by incorporating them as a constitutive element of their teaching and learning project.
Keywords:
literacies; rural education; rural youth; new technologies
Source: research archive