Literacy as “reading the world”: The construction of a socially situated concept in a school context

Abstract

This paper lays out the results of a study that investigates the representations held by public elementary school teachers in Santa Maria, southern Brazil, that define their understanding and teaching of literacy in the classroom. The corpus was collected from two questionnaires answered by teachers participating in a continuing education program. The analysis of the initial questionnaire pointed out three central concepts: literacy as “reading [criticism] of the world”, as (de)codification of written language, and as a cognitive and communicative process. The analysis of the discursive representation of literacy-related pedagogical practices showed activities focused on contextualization, interpretation, expression of thought/opinion, decoding and textual production. On the other hand, in the analysis of the final questionnaire, most literacy representations were aligned to the concept of “reading [criticism] of the world”, and few construed literacy as a means of communication. Thus, the representations of pedagogical practices were reconfigured into activities focused on the appropriation of knowledges for life and activities focused on the acquisition of writing technologies. At the end of the process, we were able to define a socially situated concept of literacy as a process of social and political empowerment that can lead the individual to transform reality and the world. As a result, we observed resignifications in the teachers’ discourse on their own teaching practice.

Keywords: representations, literacy, continuing teacher education.