Literature classes: mediation towards protagonism that makes “think about other things”

Abstract

This paper considers school as a place where students should be provided with experiences that contribute to their critical formation. The article identifies and analyzes appreciations of high school students and teachers about literary reading practices and situates the role of the agents involved in these practices. The corpus is made up of transcripts of speeches given by a literature teacher and second-year high school students in a state public school in the metropolitan region of Porto Alegre. The data were generated through semi-structured interviews, audio recorded, and conversation rounds, audio and video recorded. These records show perceptions about the reading practices of literary texts from the Literature as a subject. The discussion is supported by Compagnon (2012), Saraiva and Kaspari (2017), Cândido (2004), Cosson (2016), Zappone (2018), and Base Nacional Comum Curricular (BNCC) (Brazil, 2018), to discuss literature and its social role; and in Dieb (2014), Kleiman (1995, 2006, 2014), and Silva (2020), to reflect on literacy agency and agents. The results attest to the students' preference for practices that promote their protagonism and connections with their context, mediated by the teacher and their experiences with the literary text.