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LITERACY AND PUBLIC POLITICS: FAMILY-SCHOOL PARTNERSHIPS
Maria do Socorro Oliveira – UFRN/PPgEL [email protected]
Moisés Alberto Calle Aguirre (PPgDEM/UFRN)[email protected]
Purpose
This paper will examine teaching and learning actions in the projects “The Teaching and Learning Habitus: Constructing a New Reality in Basic Education in Natal” and “Literacies and public politics: the family in the school” – investment programs aimed at developing research in education, which are part of the actions of the MEC.
Project Description
This discussion focuses on literacy projects that were developed in a collaborative approach with initial and continued education teachers in the area of Languages and Literature (“Letras”).
Theoretical Premises Contributions of Bourdieu (1975; 2003) - notions of habitus,
field and cultural capital; Studies on situated literacy (BARTON ET AL., 1998; 2000;
STREET, 1993); Studies on critical literacy (FREIRE, 1973, 1996; LUKE,
1997; BAYNHAM, 2004; MACEDO, 1990; MCLAREN, 1997; 2000; GIROUX, 1997);
Reflections upon literacy projects (KLEIMAN, 2000; OLIVEIRA and KLEIMAN, 2008; OLIVEIRA; TINOCO; SANTOS, 2011);
Bakhtin’s conception of language whose founding principle is dialogism (BAKHTIN, 1997);
Social/ecological perspective (BROFENBRENNER, 1996).
Methodology
It is a work that integrates extension actions to an ethnographic research of critical nature (THOMAS, 1993) as it promotes the approach of the scientific community with the community of practice involved – the school –, seeking not only to understand its thinking pattern, but also to transform this cultural space in order to contribute to its participants’ strengthening, awareness and social emancipation through collaborative work.
It is organized in public schools in Natal-RN in a partnership that links university-school-community, as a means of making collaborators (teachers, students, managers, parents and other community participants) engage in the development of literacy practices that cross borders, that is, literacy practices that take place beyond the school walls and help promote open curriculum proposals, alternatives and transformations.
Literacy Projects
Actions – Literacy Projects 1. The project - “An open mouth catches no mosquitos: a
family literacy project to fight dengue” took place at Escola Municipal José Horácio de Góis, in the rural area of Distrito de Guanduba no Município de São Gonçalo do Amarante – RN, in 2012. Its participants were: 01 elementary school teacher, 02 Portuguese teachers from initial education, 16 fourth graders and 05 mothers.
2. The project - “Sunny Newspaper” took place at Escola Municipal Professor Ulisses de Góis, Nova Descoberta, in Natal/RN, in 2012. Its participants were: 01 elementary school teacher, 01 Portuguese teacher from initial education, 16 students taking their first year in elementary school and 06 mothers.
Rationale Nowadays, what people do with literacy in their social life and the
way literacy is configurated in contemporary society have been widely affected by the globalization process, by mass communication media and, naturally, by the expansion of Internet use, seen as a central element in the flow and access of information. All these mechanisms and the complexity involved, one must consider, also affect the school, a space integrated to different domains of social life.
Besides the influence of such aspects, which reflect post-modernity contingencies, students who come to school are fragile due to different processes of social exclusion (extreme poverty, violence, marginalization, social vulnerability, weakening of social ties) and human rights, motivated by socioeconomic issues, which profoundly affect the educational process.
Rationale Due to this scenario of social and human changes, we can
notice that, even though the school is aware that in modern society the different systems are organized as a network and that this connection of systems reorders or disorganizes each microsystem, the school and the knowledge produced within it remain stranded, isolated from everyday life (except for some private small-scale efforts). In practice, the school works isolated, trying to handle the education process without the collaboration of outside bodies, which are connected to the school, such as the family and the community in general.
Rationale In this sense, we believe that in order to go beyond
reproductive socialization, which chases the homogeneity of the individual and of knowledge, we must prioritize excellence when it comes to our schools, investing on public policies that value ‘human capital’, especially the ones directly involved in the transformation process: the teacher, the student and other social agents who interact in the school to build knowledge. Educating the teacher so that s/he can become an agent of transformation in the classroom implies, thus, building with him or her new methods, instrumentalized by new didactic devices.
Rationale It would consist of a practice that established neighborhoods
and partnerships, and that progressed through other fields of knowledge, produced rich miscegenation, believed in the individual’s creative capacity, as well as their power to act and intervene in social life, considered the identity features of the school and of the agents who live in it, as well as the much wished change of the school, promoted the dialog with the multiplicity of knowledge available and which are necessary in order to solve problems of interest to this local community (but not losing sight of the global). This is only possible when work is done in an engaged, cooperative, dialogic manner, which considers knowledge, plural environments and cultures, assuming thus a responsive attitude towards social life.
Rationale This highlights the need for re-inventing the school
curriculum, which must include language skills for a new kind of literacy and teacher education so that s/he is able to work with these new demands of language skills.
This reinvention would naturally lead to curriculum decapsulation.
We believe that literacy projects (KLEIMAN, 2000; OLIVEIRA, 2008; OLIVEIRA, TINOCO and SANTOS, 2010) offer rich possibilities of work in the schools, as it resignifies reading and writing practices and enables collaborative, shared learning, empowering individuals who seek to create a fair world within the school and with the school.
Rationale As special didactic organizations, literacy projects
can effectively contribute to the strengthening of the role of teacher as a literacy agent – someone who mobilizes relevant knowledge systems, resources and community members’ capacities (…) someone who fosters students’ capacities and resources and their communicative networks to participate in literacy social practices, situated uses of written language, in various institutions (KLEIMAN, 2006, p. 82 - 83).
Literacy projects - net of components (OLIVEIRA, 2010)
social practice
literacy agents
teaching genres
problem solving
emancipating curriculum
collaborative approach
situated learning
learning community
.
The teacher as a literacy agent
The teacher, as a literacy agent (KLEIMAN, 2006), assumes the role of "promoter of the capabilities and resources of his students and their communication networks to participate in social literacy practices" (KLEIMAN, 2006, p. 82-88). In fact, a mobilizer of resources, attentive to the needs, capabilities and knowledge of the learning community members and focused on building the autonomy of learners.
The teacher as a literacy agent As an 'agentive mediator' (OLIVEIRA, 2010), it is up to the
teacher mobilizing didactic resources to work textual and discursive aspects of the chosen genres, highlighting the group purpose and the functionality of these discursive practices. Also, among other duties, he must support the group for the selection and production of texts that can be used to subsidize the use of this textual practice in the students’ literacy process.
But, in this context, the teacher is not the only literacy agent. The student assumes this function too, as s/he produces what s/he knows (drawings, cartoons, products etc.) or teaches the group whatever the communicative situation requires.
The teacher as a literacy agentExamples:
In the production of a 'blog' or an 'electronic paper', guiding the group can be under the responsibility of the students without minimizing the role of the teacher.
In the production and dissemination of information about a literacy event such as “Language Fair” everyone collaborates: students, parents, administrators, community members.
In the case of the organization of “Sunny Newspaper”, the production of printed and then electronic tools, the information flow and the 'blog' maintenance and the production of written materials is borne by several collaborators: teachers, student-teachers, students, parents.
The teacher as a literacy agent In this type of learning experience,
everyone teaches and does what they know and everyone learns and benefits more significantly.
Teaching with the genres This is accomplished in practice when we do the immersion of
the learners into the universe of textual genres read and written within and outside the school, taking into consideration the idea of situated practices whose production parameters consider their needs and purposes.
To organize the event Language Fair in which the goal was to talk about dengue, exposing the evils of the disease in order to fight it. Many text genres were produced - flyers, life stories, recipes, fanzines, letters, notices, essays, printed and electronic newspaper, blog, vignette, among others, to call on the family, the general public and authorities to participate in the school life, working with the students’ linguistic education and offering help to solve the problems of the community.
Discussion
In the case of the genre pamphlet, the goal of the teacher was not in the foreground, teaching about the genre, work its textual composition, their linguistic and grammatical features, but to teach with the genre to participate in social life, making efforts to transform realities. The focus was on the functionality of the discursive practice to act in social life, which invited the teacher along with the students to wonder about other aspects of this practice: what to write, to whom address the message, why to write, what is the scope of this text.
Discussion
This social action required to leave the school walls and disseminate information, a task performed by the students, as the figure shows.
Figure 1: Delivery of flyers to the community by the students
Discussion
The recipe, meanwhile, has also been worked in the classroom not as an end in itself, but for the purpose of preparing a product - repellent - to be shown to visitors at the “Language Fair” concerned with protecting their skin from the bites of mosquitoes and gnats. The composition of the repellent and recommendations of product use were the most important information to work with in this language practice, focused, in this case, on procedural knowledge.
Figure 2: Demonstration of recipe to visitors of the fair
Discussion
In the "Sunny Newspaper" project, the blog building, used to post information regarding language activities developed with the 1st year students, aimed to make school and family closer, keeping them informed and motivating them to participate in their children’s school life.
Discussion
O blog:http://ohabitusdeestudar.wordpress.com/ was configured as an interactive feature that gave visibility to curriculum actions (texts produced by the class, conduct and teaching strategies, resources and tools for education, participants involved in the teaching-learning actions) and the forms of participation of the family and the community (visits to university, walking classes, social and educational events such as the civic parade with the participation of the army), besides motivating parents to be a part of the school and collaborating with the task of educating their children.
Discussion In educational terms, textual genres are the organizing axis of
activities with the language; the mediating instruments of human action in the world through which we can also teach and learn.
Working with genres aimed to articulate the inside and outside of school is particularly a way of decapsulating language teaching and the school environment, providing an open and integrated view of curriculum, or rather, an emancipatory view.
In this curriculum re-orientation, education is centered on local reality in real students - conscious of their rights and duties and able to build their own history and intervene in society. In working with the language, we seek to thereby promote leadership, autonomy, social mobilization, dialogism and reflexivity, for we believe that the curriculum is an artifact of change
Implications for Teacher Education
In this perspective, the projects provide for a transdisciplinary conception of knowledge, an emancipatory vision of curriculum that encapsulates the space, time and school knowledge, building a concept of differentiated teaching and learning that takes into account the interaction, engagement, collaboration. Thus, they represent an opportunity to redesign the school space and reframe the practices of reading and writing.
