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Introduction
How does a Brazilian elementary school teacher functions as mediator in the context of literary education? This paper looks into a literacy practice developed from interactions with the book Dom Quixote das Crianças, an adaptation by Monteiro Lobato. This analysis challenges the notion that Brazilian teachers subscribe only to the autonomous model of literacy; instead, I argue that teachers, in fact, adopt the ideological model of literacy. To perform this task, I use data collected in the classroom, and I base my observations on the New Literacy Studies (NLS) and on a dialogic approach to language and discourse.
As for the theoretical and methodological perspective, this analysis is based on the concept of literacy as a social practice; as it is seen in the NLS and carried out by Heath (1983), Street (1984, 1995, 2003) and Barton, Hamilton and Ivanic (2000). This concept has influenced Brazilian researchers since the 90’s, giving rise to strong debates in the field of literacy research. I find that NLS’s concept of literacy helps to clarify how people in different contexts carry out literacy practices, considering that one cannot address writing separately from the social context. By considering literacy as a social and cultural practice, the NLS have questioned the predominant conception that assumes literacy as a universal, neutral and a technical skill (Street, 1984).
In order to avoid dichotomies, especially the one between autonomous and ideological models, I analyze this practice as a social process that always entails a tension between those models. As claimed by Street (1995, p. 151):
These models do not set up a dichotomy in the field, rather that all models of literacy can be understood within an ideological framework and that those termed “autonomous” only appear on the surface to be neutral and value free. In this sense, it is those who want to retain an “autonomous” view of literacy who are responsible for a dichotomy; those who subscribe to the ideological model do not deny the significance of technical aspects of reading and writing (…) rather they argue these features of literacy are always embedded in particular social practices.
Two working concepts have enabled researchers to apply the idea of literacy as a social practice to specific data: literacy events (Heath, 1983) and literacy practices (Street, 1995, 2003).
The literacy events have stressed the importance of a mix of oral and literacy features in everyday communication (…) Literacy practices I would take as referring not only to the event itself but to the conceptions of the reading and writing process that people hold when they engage in the event (Street, 1995, p. 133).
With these as basis, I identify the meaningful literacy events (Heath, 1983) that characterize the teacher and students’ interactions with a given literary text, taking the oral language elicited in those events as a main aspect of analysis. Thereby, my goal is not to make judgments about the practice itself, but rather to put it into an ethnographic perspective in order to understand how participants in the communicative process construe literacy and, thus, to draw out underlying practices that give meaning to the events.
I have taken an ideological view on language underpinned on the Dialogic Discourse of Bakhtin (1981), Volochinov (1995) and his followers (Wertsch, 1991; Holquist, 2002; Maybin, 2006; Macedo; Mortimer, 2000; Macedo, 2005; Bloome, 2005). It could be claimed that the chosen research perspective potentially provides a deeper understanding of the way in which literacy practices are construed through the classroom discourse and of how subjects act and react to each other in the language communication process. This point of view suggests that, once each participant takes a different role in the interaction, the practices are subject to a power relation. Furthermore, to analyze the classroom interactions, I have employed the concepts of voice, polyphony, dialogue, authoritative and persuasive discourse, in order to understand how students and teachers communicate in the literacy events.
For Bakhtin (1981, p. 341) “the dialogic becoming of a human being… is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others”; a conception that matches Volochinov’s perspective on dialogue. To the latter, dialogue goes beyond face-to-face interaction, meaning that literacy practices are naturally dialogic once established an interaction among reader, author and text, as well as among students, texts and teachers. Bakhtin also observes that are two dimensions to discourse: it comes from someone and it is addressed to an interlocutor. The authoritative and persuasive dimensions simultaneously constitute the utterance. “Both, the authority of the discourse and its internal persuasiveness may be united in a single word - one is simultaneously authoritative and internally persuasive” (Bakhtin, 1981, p. 342).
Methodology
The classroom data-collection took place in 2006 over a six-month period, through video-recordings and observations in a second-year elementary school attended by 29 students, age raging from eight to nine years old, from working class families in São João del-Rei. As complementary data, I interviewed the teacher (Patrícia) to determine some aspects of her pedagogical practice that could not be inferred from video-recordings. It is worth highlighting that, in the ethnographic perspective, merely focusing on the interaction does not sufficiently explains a practice: an analysis of materials and interviews to research subjects must be included in order to contrast different searches of data and consequently to develop a more realistic point of view. I assume that
By adopting an ethnographic perspective, we mean that is possible to take a more focused approach (i.e. do less than a comprehensive ethnography) to study particular aspects of everyday life and cultural practices of a social group (Green; Bloome, 1997, p. 181).
Patrícia, the interviewee, holds two degrees (Pedagogy and Philosophy) and has 22 years of experience working part-time in elementary schools. She attended professional development programs offered by Federal University of São João del-Rei and Municipal Secretary of Education, in which literacy was discussed extensively.
Findings
General aspects of the literacy practice
From Patrícia’s words, it is clear that she uses the Portuguese textbook, albeit not every day, but two or three times a week as pedagogical support:
I always use textbooks, but I consider they are not the only way to build knowledge. They act as support. To this day, I use textbooks because I have to. It is an obligation and a demand from the students’ parents. However, I don’t work as so many other teachers do; going from page to page until the end of the book.
For additional support, she also employs social texts such as newspapers, storybooks, letters, folders and magazines. Patrícia believes that writing fulfills different purposes in society and that school literacy should be carried out through a social perspective; which means using textual diversity to structure literacy events. In Freire’s (2005) and Freire and Macedo’s (1990) perspective, literacy is conceived by teachers as a political issue, a path for the working class population to freedom, power and liberty.
When asked how she plans a literacy practice, she answered: “I start with the general school proposal for early literacy for the school year, [but] each fifteen days all teachers meet to plan the activities together”. Talking about how she plans a specific class, she said, “my classroom is quite diverse. I have multi-level students (…) [so] I keep my options open. The class today depends on what happened yesterday (…). My starting point is what I know about my students (…)”. As an example of one of the literacy projects developed by the whole school, Patrícia mentioned the storytelling; an initiative based mainly on literary books for which she is responsible.
Patrícia was also questioned how she develops a practice with social texts, her reply drew attention to her use of newspapers; among which are the Gazeta, the local university newspaper (Jornal da UFSJ). However, she may be using this type of text at the end of the school year because, by then, students are expected to be already fluent readers, which facilitates the usage of newspapers.
Usually, I bring newspapers to the classroom to assess the type of knowledge my students have about them, because they recognize some of these. (…) After that, we begin to construct texts in the classroom.
From Patrícia’s words, we could infer that literacy as a social practice proposed by Brazilian literacy policy (see National Curriculum Parameters, in: Brasil. MEC, 1996) has influenced her teaching. We can also infer that she assumes it is best to organize the classroom interactions in small groups and pairs:
First of all, as you can see, I don’t display the students one after the other. I organize learners in small groups or pairs and, sometimes, in groups of four. I also use the horse-shoe classroom layout. I found out that these are the arrangements that really allow my students to learn with each other; because this is how we learn with each other. I learn a lot with my students.
An interesting observation considering that most Brazilian schools do not use collective desks in elementary classrooms. This teacher may be deviating from that because she subscribes to a different conception of learning and, consciously, propels students to work in groups, sharing activities and knowledge, as we will analyze later.
Predominantly, the literacy activities observed in this classroom are focused on reading practices. According to the teacher “reading is everything; it is the most important way to build knowledge (…). By reading a lot, we learn more words, which allow us to improve our writing”. I also noticed that the educator prescribed some writing activities that were related to a prior reading practice; for instance, in a class, while working in small groups, the students were told to elaborate written questions related to a text read before. I did not notice grammar related activities, as well as decoding activities extracted from the texts. Since most of her students could already decode, we did not observe specific activities focusing on the sounds, words or letters. It occurred only in events in which the teacher was assisting specific students to write texts.
Everyday Patrícia reads to students using different strategies. For example, she reads a passage of the text and leaves the rest for the next day, with the purpose of stimulating her students about the text. She also tells them stories she knows by memory. By reading texts aloud she intends to improve students’ fluency and intonation, since her reading might serve as a reference guide to educate proficient readers. After the reading activity, she displays the students in a circle to discuss the story, a process she called “oral interpretation”. In her words: “through the oral interpretation, the students that have a harder time building knowledge will be able to improve their learning process faster (…) that way I get better results”. It is worth mentioning there is a link between the written and oral languages that constitutes literacy events, something Heath (1983) also stressed.
During the interview, Patrícia emphasizes her choice to use literary texts such as poetry and stories: “As you can see, I work with literary texts a lot; (…) I teach early literacy basing on the stories, poetry, theatre, and everything I can use to develop a differentiated methodology, a more pleasurable teaching”. We can observe an emphasis in the idea of literacy as a social practice. Indeed, she says: “Unfortunately, it was not in school but in theatre classes that I learned to use correct intonation while reading”. Evidently, this teacher has a unique cultural background. Considering that, in Brazil, it is not common to see elementary school teachers who have attended art courses. Probably, the local context contributes to her cultural background as well, inasmuch as São João del-Rei harbors a variety of artistic influences, like classical music, theatre and traditional schools of samba.
According to the subject or concept of a given lesson, the teacher chooses the stories and literary texts she is going to use. When she cannot find the text that she needs at school or in the municipal library, she writes one herself. She works with pedagogical projects to teach most of the subjects, such as social studies, history, philosophy etc., which means she proposes her students inquiring activities based on social texts.
When the focus is not on the literary book, the teacher uses other genres such as poems, news articles, letters and instructional texts. She asks students to do a silent reading of the texts followed by an alternated oral reading, in which they take turns between paragraphs or sentences. Occasionally, they would repeat a certain segment many times, which presents an opportunity for the teacher to evaluate fluency, intonation and word pronunciation. After this activity, Patrícia carries an oral discussion and poses some questions that the students should answer in small groups. This kind of literacy event is typical not only for this classroom, but in other elementary classrooms as well, as investigated by Macedo (2005), Macedo, Almeida and Tibúrcio (2017).
As mentioned before, this teacher carries writing activities in which the students must elaborate questions taking a text as base; this should give the students an opportunity to create hypotheses to be answered by a further reading of the text. She explains why this strategy is important for the learning process:
I wanted, with that activity, to evaluate the students’ skills to create hypotheses; because in school, most of the time, we interpret the texts in a traditional way, which is: the teacher asking and the students’ answering in a very repetitive way. It’s so boring; I don’t like it (…) I use this as an opportunity for all the students to share their knowledge, because all of them have something to share. Higher level students, those who read more, construe interesting questions, not superficial ones, but complex questions that need inferences.
After working in small groups, students are oriented to choose a representative to report their production to the whole class. There is a typical literacy event strongly marked by the use of oral language to build the literacy practice. Henceforth, I will present some class fragments in order to display how a classroom literacy practice is constructed when students are presenting their discussions of a literary text.
Interpreting Dom Quixote de la Mancha
The following chart shows how the group presentation takes place and the importance it carries for this lesson. Indeed, this sequence illustrates the value of literary books to the students’ literacy process.
Upon the beginning of the class, Patrícia asks each group a different question related to the story of Dom Quixote de la Mancha. This research’s data collection was done during a whole-month’s project regarding the Four Hundred Years of Dom Quixote de La Mancha. Text discussions, exhibitions of written texts, workshops and a presentation in the Conservatory of Music were organized; the story was also played at the school’s VII Literary and II Philosophical Exhibition.
The teacher posed the following questions: Do you think that reading can drive a person mad? What do you think of someone who always reads the same kind of books and stories? Why did Dom Quixote get involved with the stories he read? What do books really bring to us? What do you think happened in Dom Quixote’s mind? Who is your favorite hero? The sequence below shows how one of the small groups discussed the question: What do books bring to us? Marcos, the group’s representative, presented what they had discussed:
Source: author’s elaboration
1Note from the reviewer: In this context, the word “tia” (in Portuguese) is an endearing term often used by young students to refer to their teacher
2Note from the reviewer: In this context, the word “bem” (in Portuguese) is an endearing term equivalent to the word “dear”
Chart 1: Transcription of the group’s discussion
Firstly, I would like to highlight the elements that figure in this literacy event in order to evidence the constitutive material features of this practice. Besides the physical presence of the students, teacher and researcher, the author of Dom Quixote de la Mancha also figures in the event, considering that all students know the author’s name, the title of the book and a little bit of his history. Moreover, the publisher and the State participate indirectly through the National Curriculum Parameters (PCN - Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais), that defend the use of literary books for the elaboration of literacy events. Different sheets with questions are provided by the teacher to prompt the discussions are there as well. Thus, these are the features that provide the initial conditions for the development of this literacy event. Moreover, an analysis of the students and teachers’ interaction is fundamental to further understand how this literacy practice took place.
Because she proposed an open-questioned group discussion of Dom Quixote de La Mancha, we can infer how eager Patrícia was to hear what the students had to say. The questions were unscripted; thus, albeit not having previous knowledge of the students’ answers, the teacher had expectations of what they had to say about the book and about the meaning of literary text reading. Then, how exactly do the group four and the rest of the class address the question: what do books really bring to us?
I start by highlighting the performance of the representative of the group, Marcos. A superficial analysis could indicate that his performance was poor, since he spoke too quietly and took the floor only twice during the presentation, as the Chart 1 shows at turns 9 and 11. However, it is worth mentioning that his answers: “the books bring imagination, adventures” and “wisdom” were legitimated by the teacher and served as a reference to the whole class in the subsequent turns. Turn 12 shows the teacher evaluating Marcos’ answers and establishing a dialogue based on the words “wisdom” and “imagination” (turns 12 and 17). Turn 15 is important for the development of the subsequent interventions; when Pedro takes the floor and adds the more-detailed comment: “We go into the book”, emphasizing the way in which students read storybooks. Adding to Rita’s comment (turn 21), the teacher reiterates Marcos’ comments by repeating the word “adventures” (turn 22).
Only by turn 23, I noticed the addition of a new idea when Adriana draws parallels between reading books and being intelligent; a comment well commended by the teacher. It is clear that the notion that one must read literary books, and not just any literary books but the canonicals, to achieve a high level of literacy is dominant. It represents a perspective of literary books as something universal that should be read by all students independently of their context for the purpose of improving their literacy skills. At this point, I pose a question: why were just literary books provided to all schools under national policy until 2014 rather than all types of texts, such as newspapers, in order to perform literary practices?
Even as the PCN emphasizes textual diversity as a condition for literacy teaching through an ideological perspective, the literary book remains the core of this policy since newspapers and other kinds of texts are not made available. If the teacher wants to work with different texts she has to provide them to the students herself vis-à-vis the unavailability of these texts in schools’ libraries.
In the next turns, Mariana (turn 25) and Carolina (turn 27) make new contributions that point to a notion currently permeating the Brazilian school context, a relation among book reading, vocabulary expansion and learning improvement. These voices markedly meet the teacher’s expectation. She rephrases the utterance and gives it a positive evaluation (turn 26) stressing the role literary books fill in the education of proficient readers (turn 28). That is the main notion regarding the classroom literacy practice, as pointed out by the teacher in the interview; literary books improve not only the students’ reading skills but their whole learning process. The whole sequence is evidence that students appropriated this value. Thus, we observe a tension between in and out of the school literacy, once the literary books are social texts and originally are not written to teach reading and writing. Therefore, because the teleological nature of the teaching-learning process, the teacher sought to accomplish her goal: teaching literacy.
In turn 40, Elena dialogues with other voices appropriated through past experiences: “We imagine other languages, other authors”. It shows that she makes a connection between present and past readings. Then, school literacy can be dialogic in the sense that multiple voices arise and take an important role in the meaning making process through the interaction between reader, text and author. Turn 43 indicates that the students recognize that images contribute to construct a creative and imaginative process in this specific literacy event, as Carol says: “We sail through the book with the pictures”. Patrícia reinforces Carol’s comment, in coherence with their pedagogical practice that, as the teacher previously said in the interview, privileges literary books as the main resource to improve students’ literacy.
Turn 45 could signal that students have appropriated a “traditional pedagogy” voice that claims learning is a process rooted just on the memory. In this occasion, one student had a doubt about as to whether the teacher expected of them memorized answers or not. For reply Patrícia makes clear she is not expecting memorized answers; and, in fact, she asked them open questions in order to assess the students’ comprehension of Dom Quixote’s story and of the meaning of reading literary books.
In turn 50, Patrícia did not answer Victor, which is the first moment she ignores a student’s intervention. She focuses the discussion on the book, refusing to encourage students to make a connection between movies and storybooks, constraining the students’ answers. This kind of position is very common in classrooms investigated by Macedo (2005, 2010).
Most times, comments not directly related to the topic are just ignored by the teacher. As we pointed out earlier, the teaching-learning process is constructed by the tension between authoritative and persuasive discourse. With his utterance, Vitor builds up some tension trying, to no avail, to persuade the teacher to open the dialogue.
Conclusions
This article analyzes the reading of a storybook as an illustration of how literacy practices are constructed in the perspective of the ideological model of literacy. By scrutinizing classroom interactions, it was possible to identify how literacy, as a social practice, has been constructed. Also, an argument has been made that there are no contradictions between working with both literature and social texts, since each textual genre brings its specific contribution to the student’s literacy process.
The use of literary books is a practice that characterizes some of the elementary schools’ literacy in the Brazilian context. Normally, the teacher poses objective questions about the storybooks as a way to evaluate whether the students internalized aspects like the sequence of the narrative, the main characters, the scenario and how it ends. In this case study, I have noticed a wider and differentiated use of literary texts, since the teacher’s questions had no relation to the story itself but were aimed to let students talk about their past experiences with literary books. She also offered opportunities to students play the stories outside school.
The focus on literary books in school evidences the re-contextualization of their use according to Brazilian school culture, in which reading literary books outside school is a much different literacy practice than reading the same text in school, as claimed by Soares (1999). However, we hope that the in-school reading of a literary book would be carried out in a critical and dialogical perspective in order to contribute to the students’ education.
Besides that, I would like to point out that not all texts that circulate outside school are written as a support to schooling process. Nevertheless, it is our expectation that school literacy will become more based on social texts in a way that allow students to critically recognize the social function of writing, as noticed in this literacy practice
