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Angélica Maia
Rodrigo Abrantes da Silva
William Cope
Alessandra Coutinho Fernandes
Petrilson Pinheiro
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José Jailson De Farias
Daniela Gomes De Araújo Nóbrega
Luciana Censi
Ana Carla Barros Sobreira
Daiane LourencoLetramentos’s Updates
Trying out critical literacy in public schools
The example that I want to share here comes from my PhD research and is not new for many of the participants in this community, as I have been presenting different parts of this work in conferences and workshops since the end of 2008, when I started analysing my data. I worked with 3 public school teachers trying to implement ideas and sugestions from the - at that time - recent document on language teaching in High Schools in Brazil (Orientações Curriculares para o Ensino Médio). The suggestions from this document were as much new for the teachers as they were for myself. That's why I want to highlight the tentative nature of the work we did. The participant teachers developed several activities to be used in their different contexts. Not all of them were successful, but we all learned a lot from this experience.
For lack of space and time, I will quickly describe only one of these activities (and, as I said, many of you may already have seen it elsewhere). Dora, one of the participant teachers, made a point of always working through the four skills "model" of communicative teaching plus the systemic-lexical sub-skills. She prepared her own material as English textbooks had not made their way to public schools yet (PNLD, the Brazilian National Plan for Textbooks, has only very recently included Foreign Language textbooks).
For this activity, Dora started with a reading text on mobile phones, from Nokia website. Students read the very small text individually or in groups as they wished and then the teacher discussed the linguistic elements with the whole group. They also discussed about buying objects (in this case, mobile phones) from on-line shops and the problems that may follow, such as never getting what you've payed for or getting a deffective object. Students did vocabulary and grammar exercises related to the text (in a very tradional way) and were also supposed to make up a dialogue role playing a customer and a shop manager to be present to the class to practice their aural skills (listening/speaking). The customer was supposed to complain about something that had been bought at the store and the manager had to offer a solution to the problem.
The written production activity was a formal complaint letter. The teacher presented the new genre to the students, gave examples and discussed the differences in Brazilian and English styles for formal letters. Students were then supposed to write their own letters of complaint, pretending they had bought a mobile phone from an on-line shop and it was defective or broken. They also had to demand a solution from the manufacturer.
The results of this activity (and others) is published in a paper that I will soon share with all of you. In the paper, I argue that, although there were problems faced by students and teachers due to the constraints of public school settings, critical skills can be taught in schools. I also argue that activities such as this may empower students for future life beyond the school contexts, by creating space for them to practice certain skills in a safe and supportive environment first, before they really have to use these skills in real-life situations.
After reading the suggested chapter on New Learning, I suppose this (and other activities created by these teachers) can be a good example, though by no means perfect, of tranformative learning. What do you think?
)_20Foto_20de_20F_C3_A1bio.png "Fábio Bezerra")
Hi, Karla and Fernando! It was really interesting, for me, to read Karla's post, for many reasons. First of all, because your research, Karla, has gone deeper that simply pointing out problems (which is OK, I guess, but maybe not enough). As you have described, you actually suggested changes, you worked with a group of teachers who were actually engaged in changing, somehow. Also, I was interested in reading more about your research because I myself was an English teacher in a public school too, and therefore, experienced many of the difficulties you might have faced when you went to this context and dealt with the obstacles found in this setting. And it should be said, as you pointed, that despite the lack of resources and problems (theoretical, practical, methodological, physical) that still exist in public schools, it is possible to develop good work there, especially with a solid foundation such as the critical literacies. In my opinion, your example could definitely be seen as tranformative, because it empowers students, it gives them tools to be socially active in other settings, as you said. Anyway, I just wanted to state how much I appreciate research that focus on public schools and that try to help its teachers / directors / pedagogical managers in their own difficulties. It shows that, even though some teachers and parents, like Fernando said, are resistant to changes and changing, the gap between the university and academic research and the schools can be filled, as hard as it may be.
I believe that the first step to promote transformative pedagogies in Brazil is to change teachers’ and students’ conception of what learning is. Hence, I would like to talk about the atmosphere in elementary schools, which is the field where I teach. First of all, I believe that one of the reasons teachers are reluctant about transformative pedagogies is related to teacher’s and students’ comfort zones. Working in elementary schools for the past 8 years, I see that teachers still apply the didactic pedagogy mostly, just a few use the authentic paradigm and I have noticed that educators almost never try to use transformative approaches or sometimes they do not even know what it is. Even parents are enthusiastics of the didactic approach and when a teacher tries something different, he can be accused of ‘pretending to be teaching’. Besides, I cannot tell how many times I heard people saying that a ‘good teacher’ is the one who knows how to ‘transmit’ knowledge. In my opinion, the roots of Jesuitic education in Brazil as well as dictatorship unfortunately still influence the pedagogies teachers apply nowadays.
To my mind, in the first years of elementary school, when learners’ attitudes provoke inquiry and curiosity, most of the times their voices are supplemented by a feeling that they are doing something wrong, that is, they are taught that the student’s role is just to keep quiet and pay attention. Therefore, since the initial years they are trained to silence their voices, and it is very difficult to change this framework when they grow up. I have also taught teenagers of different ages in language institutes and many times when I try to make them express themselves or do something different of the traditional pedagogies, I realize a feeling of constraint or shyness and it is very challenging to engage them in discussion.
Due to hazardous factors in classroom, such as lack of resources, violence, parents’ absence in students’ lives, drugs, low wages, especially in public schools, I have noticed that it is easier for educators to just let it go.