Práticas de leitura e escrita na educação de jovens e adultos: como formar leitores e escritores?

Abstract

It is well known that there is an active movement of the subject towards the text, involving the training of readers and writers in school, the teacher being both interlocutor and mediator in the process. Through this investigation, it was possible to demonstrate how the knowledge of the world brought to the classroom by young and adult learners with little or no schooling is legitimized, enabling them to acknowledge their status as readers and writers. To take hold of this finding , a research in reading and writing practices in a youth and adult education classroom (EJA) was carried out, with the purpose of relating them to the practices of reading and writing in those learners´ daily lives. I have resorted to theoretical contributions from reference studies in reading and writing acquisition and also in the training of readers and writers, that were produced by authors in the field of EJA as well as other areas. Classroom observation also helped us to develop a better understanding of the importance of resorting to methodological procedures as a means to grasp the revelations of the pedagogical practice. The theoretical-methodological approach adopted is of a qualitative kind. It made use of instruments such as a field diary, semi-structured interviews and a profile card, i.e., a card meant to register each subject´s profile, besides systematic observation. These instruments were useful to prompt us to perceive what was going on in the readers and writers´ education process inside a classroom which integrated the Youth and Adult Education Program (PEJA) in that particular municipality of the State of Rio de Janeiro. I dare say that the reading and writing teaching practices proposed by the teacher in the classroom under investigation represented a break from abyssal logic (as nominated in Santos 2009), since the activities carried out took into account the learners´ life conditions and their own knowledge, not restricting themselves to the school selection of contents, which are looked at by the hegemonic logic in the world hierarchy as the only legitimate knowledge. Nevertheless, other issues related those reading and writing teaching practices could be questioned. One of them is the fact that most of the activities were done individually, although debates were conducted permanently with the participation of the whole group. Furthermore, the dialogues involved primarily teacher and students, instead of students and their peers. This practice limited the horizontal interaction among subjects. Finally, I think that the organization of the Program was inspired in the school logic, which requires that the learning process advances along a serial sequence, thus questioning the concept of continuum maintained by EJA and, ultimately, the students´ right to lifelong education.