Multimodal Literacies MOOC’s Updates

Update #2 The Phonics Approach in Brazil: a polemic reading program

In Brazil, reading is a meaning making that is constantly being jeopardized by the political programs. In the 2015 edition, the Programme for International Student Assessment (2015) showed that Brazil was in the 59th position in reading and in the 65th position in mathmatics, in a total of 70 countries. The brazilian average punctuation in reading was 407 points, a significantly inferior position towards the average punctuation from the others members countries members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) - 493 points. Amongst the brazilian students, 51% couldn't get to the level 2 in reading, considered the minimum needed to the full exercise of citizenship, according to OECD. In Math, they got the average punctuation of 377 points, while the students average from the other countries of OECD got 490 points. 

To sum up, reading is not getting any better with the changes and modifications all over the years, mainly based on constructivism. However, the new plan of Bolsonaro's govern, the National Literacy Politics (Política Nacional de Alfabetização) brings what to them may be the solution: the prioritization of the phonics method, based on deconding, teaching of reading and writing and the focus on the first childhood, which would be from 0 to 5 years old as the audience of the program.

The text doesn't bring oppenly explicit an specific model of literacy to be adopted, but it brings a new name, one which has brought goosebumps and horrror to many brazilians : literacia - in opposition to the name we have always used, letramento.

In Brazil, we make a distinction between letramento and alfabetização. Both means literacy, but letramento refers to an wider view of reading - understantind context, informal ways of reading and decoding and comprehension. Alfabetização, on the other hand, is the pure decodification of the phonemes and graphemes. This change, from letramento to literacia, was not seen by the majority as a good signal, but quite the opposite, it reveals the very fury and hate of Bolsonaro's educational team holds against constructivism and Paulo Freire's idea of contextualization of teaching and learning, emancipation of classes through education and freedom. It is not only a semantic change, but a political one. It urges to say: we are no longer teaching our kids how to read texts to understand and trasnform their context and lives, but to decode the texts and answer the questions that are made to them.

Although the text doesn't come along with the name phonics method on it, it gives us clues. The expressions 'phonemic consciousness', 'sistematic phonic instruction', closed related to phonics method are mentioned in the essential items list in which emphasis will be given.

The polemic lies on the fact that it is a problem the imposition of one method to be adopted on cities and attach federal assistance to its adoption. As for the method per se, it is not a consensus among the specialists in Literacy. The debate about how working with many approaches and diverse methods to teach literacy is better for results has gained the scenario for too long to governs want to oblige the adoption of only one.

In addition, there is also a promotion about family literacy, "literacia familiar" - that would be a set of practices and experiences related to language, reading and writing that the child experiences with the family. The problem is that the richer the families are, more experiences, refined structures and exposition to writing and reading the children have, and in Brazil, 43,5% of the children until 14-years-old live in poor environemnts. Therefore, those will be the ones who will get to school and will stay behind those who had better input at home. 

Another point is that the specialists on the side of the government defend that this literacy has to began even earlier, to help solve the gap that will emerge later, in the teenagers with huge problmes in reading and comprehension, and not with storytelling, exploring stories from the daily routine, exposition to the synaesthetic modes of meaning making, but with the development of refined motor skills, stimulus to the cognitive development to recognize the alphabet and startinf the process of decoding.

In conclusion, it is a long path that brazilian teachers have to walk through. As Kalantzis said at the first video of this section, 9.1, the teachers should "know the whole field, the theories and debates to have a repertoire of approches in order to meet the need of their individual learners". Only that way, we will be able to help our audience to learn to read and write, no matter what programms are in fashion.

The link for those who have interest in reading the Brazil's National Literacy Program: http://portal.mec.gov.br/images/banners/caderno_pna_final.pdf