Thirtieth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

In this paper we present a theoretical hybrid framework for ethics and literacy applied to language teaching and autoethnography. The philosopher Emanuel Levinas defends that alterity and singularity are ways of questioning stable and colonized social notions about the other and about our own subjectivity. In order to have some understanding of the process of developing our identity as English language teachers in the Brazilian public school system, we revisit some life experiences through Levinas’ lenses and its ethics of the other using autoethnographic narratives. Two of these accounts tell about moments lived by one of the authors in the school environment, and they are related to Levinas’ face-to-face encounter between the self and the other person. The other two narratives describe the aesthetic encounter between the self and two other symbolic subjects - a prostitute and a “Preto-Velho”.