Production of different literacies

Abstracts

Neste texto questionamos o conceito de letramento, da "modernidade", observando-o como se fosse a nova teoria que vem para substituir o conceito de "alfabetização" e suas práticas, de modo a construir modos efetivos de inserção do sujeito no mundo da escrita. Utilizando-nos especialmente dos conceitos bakhtinianos de gêneros do discurso e também de ato responsável, a partir de enunciados concretos que exemplificam a prática docente atual, buscamos mostrar que o problema fundamental no ensino não está na mudança de nome de uma prática de ensino, mas tanto na mistura de duas realidades distintas quando se fala em diferentes níveis de letramento ou de diferentes letramentos, quanto na distribuição desigual dos bens culturais na sociedade.

Letramento; Alfabetização; Círculo de Bakhtin; Gêneros do discurso; Ato responsável

ARTIGOS

Production of different literacies

João Wanderley Geraldi

Universidade Estadual de Campinas – UNICAMP, Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil; [e-mail]

ABSTRACT

In this paper we question the "modern" concept of literacy, observing it as it is a new theory aiming at replacing the concept of "alphabetization" and its practices so as to produce effective ways of inserting the subject in the worlds of writing and reading. We especially employ the Bakhtinian concepts of speech genres and responsible act on concrete utterances that exemplify the current teaching practice in order to show that the key problem in education is not the name change of a teaching practice, but it is both the mixture of two different realities when it comes to different levels of literacy or to different literacies and the unequal distribution of cultural goods in society.

Keywords: Literacy; Alphabetization; Bakhtin Circle; Speech Genres; Responsible Act

... the eternal struggle between theory and practice: One has instinct of youth, habits of activities and a fondness for future and progress; The other shows the coldness of mature age and an essentially prosaic and conservative nature, which is faithful to its past, its master, suspicious of the future that it does not know, harsh towards new ideas, whose mischievous moods make it impatient. One plays and hopes for tomorrow, it is like a child; the other scolds and sighs over yesterday, it is like a grandfather. One loves ideal and it is a repairer of tuertos, it is like Don Quixote; the other hates utopias and is pleased with the established order of things, like Sancho. In every field of human sciences, one may find those two rows of contenders face to face. While the new doctor bases his arguments regarding recent physiological findings, the old practical shrugs, smiles and formulates or operates. While the young scholar develops social science theories, transcendent views of law philosophy, the legal scholar, hoary in the forum, examines the articles of the code, goes over the letters of the law, advises the parties and disposes case files.

Júlio Diniz, Uma família inglesa [An English Family] (our translation)

The counterpoint between theory and practice, which is employed by me here as an epigraph, appears when the characters Charles and Manoel Quintino argue about accounting process optimization. As presented by the narrator, this counterpoint enforces a separation between theory and practice, as if there were not constitutive relations between them. It is precisely because it outlines those worlds in black and white that the chosen epigraph can serve us as an indicator of an opposition to avoid when dealing with literacy and "alphabetization."

The concept of literacy is very hard to specify, because it refers to subjects both as readers that access their abilities to move themselves in a world inhabited by texts and as authors of new texts, who enrich the legacy of concrete utterances available in different spheres of social communication of a given society.

Although the theoretical concept is not limited to the processes of initiation into the world of writing and reading, it is particularly to those that it has been applied by us, as if "literacy" were the name to be given to the initiation of social subjects in a world that would only be accessed by them through this process.

Textbooks for literacy incorporate this concept in their titles, government programs for training primary school teachers also make use of it on their titles (Pró-letramento [For Literacy), and numerous courses and scholar works dealing with "literacy" are restricted to the period when one is learning one's first letters. As a consequence of this approach, one can ask: "What are the changes implied by a designation change?"; that is the case of Zaccur (2011), who uses this question as a subtitle of her book Alfabetização e letramento ["Alphabetization" and literacy].

Another difficulty in understanding this expression is due to its quick expansion to different fields: the first stages of learning different subjects (mathematics, for example) or even the different practical techniques that do not make their users experts (Information technology, for example) began to be designated as "Mathematical literacy," "Digital literacy," "Legal literacy," etc.

This expansion of the word use and the dubiousness of its meanings led me to believe that literacy is too broad a concept, covering such a range of phenomena that makes it epistemologically problematic (GERALDI, 2011). This criticism has nothing to do with biased restrictions on the utilization that has been socially given to the expression: The social practice of using an expression covers it with an aura of meaning which can be extremely diffuse, but does not stop language from functiontioning in face of those relative meaning indeterminations. The awareness of these (in a broader way) helps understanding the themes of the concrete utterances. I am employing here a distinction that appears in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (VOLOŠINOV, 1986

Mottos as "to alphabetize by literacy and to literate by alphabetizing" only reaffirm this term's special referential aspect to the early stages of the world of writing and reading (or to any world that it expresses – such as the world of mathematics and legal science – or to typing skills that has made press acessible from the typing machine until this surprisingly digital world).

I will not revisit here the study of this concept or the consequences of its assumption both in the scholar world and in the political world, which make use of such a concept to entitle their official programs. There is already extensive literature on the subject and on the moment when the concept stopped being a study hypothesis to become commonly used, being employed beyond the frontiers of theoretical studies. I would only like to register that no alphabetization performed before the "modern" concept of literacy has thought about it as a one-time process in which the learners were not expected to be writing and reading. Even these "alphabetizations," which were belived to be only about learning stages of coding and decoding, thought that this learning would happen without contemplating the greater world of writing and reading and their social uses, because, if so, the efforts to alfabetize would be innocuous; thus, the access to the world of writing and reading is both in the alphabetization horizon and in the literacy, the latter being presented as a "new theory" (it does not occur without recovering past practices, including those alphabetization methods that were doomed by other critical studies). I am interested here in the adjective that comes next to it in the title of this study: "different literacies." And I am mainly interested in problematizing the development of these "different" literacies.

1 Different Spheres of Social Communication

As taught by Bakhtin (2013, p.60

Taking in consideration this diversity (and its particularization) as characteristic of contemporary societies, we may say that we are distinctly skilled to socially use a language, because this always implies the employment of a speech genre. Obviously, we move around different areas or spheres of social communication and for this reason we master various speech genres. However, we do not move around all spheres with the same capacity: As not assiduous readers of the highly technical and specialized utterances from the fields of engineering, math, or visual arts, we will have greater difficulty reading them and we will be practically not able to produce them. The same applies to those, who are from such fields, when they face utterances from pedagogy or philoshopy. We are at the same time competent and incompetent text readers and producers depending on our activity fields and on our movement around different areas of activity. If we designate every initial stage of every field as a process of "literacy," there will be as many literacies as the inexhaustible possibilities of human activity specialization. And we would have different literacies, as the recent use of adjectives implies: digital, legal, philosophical literacies...

In this sense, the adjective "different" associated to literacy does nothing more than acknowledge the real complexity of the social uses of language. And we learned differently according to the different fields of activity – at the same time, we are literate and illiterate. Previously, we called it specialization, without the need to appeal to the "illiteracy" of readers and authors of texts, who, outside their own fields, are not "proficient" (to use here an expression which agrees with the contemporary likes) in remote areas of those social subjects needs and interests.

Certainly, the characteristic circulation of inhabitants in a complex world allows us to recognize and, sometimes, to comprehend what is not familiar to us. This happens because the speech genres keep relations between them, which are called intergeneric: no field of human activity exists without relationships with its exterior and, therefore, there are communicative exchanges, there are dialogues in greater or lower extent.

A careful reading of Bakhtin's work (2013

Cristina Campos, who is a teacher in a municipal school on the outskirts of Campinas, SP, is used to writing chronicles about events that take place in her classes. These chronicles are refered by her research group as "popcorns," because the events pop up in the daily routine of every school, class and teacher. Let's read one of those delightful chronicles.

A magazine's preferences

Yesterday one of my pupils asked me to learn how to write my name and today that request was restated:

- Cristina, today we are going to write your name, aren't we? – I smiled at him and answered yes. Subsequently to a group chat, a reading and a storytelling performed by them, I said to all of them:

- Well, now we are going to write my name, but we will need to look for it in a magazine. The boy, the smallest one of the group, asked me:

- Why are you in the magazine?

- I'm not in the magazine, João, or even better, we are all in the magazine! – By the look in their eyes, I noticed that nobody understood what I meant, then I whispered:

- I will tell you a secret! – Can you keep a secret? – They nodded their heads and held their breaths:

- Good! The magazines have eaten and eat all the letters in the world. They go wherever there are letters for them to eat and so do books, newspapers and....

Before I could finish it, Hugo said:

- Is that the reason why we come to school? Is that because they eat letters? – I just nodded my head to confirm it in order not to laugh about his surprised expression.

I explained the activity and handed them the magazines. After a while, João asks me another question:

- Teacher, we eat food, and magazines eat letters. Is that right?

- That's it. Do you prefer eating letters or food? – He thought for a little while and answered:

- I prefer pasta! – And just as I was about to answer, Hugo states the following:

- Teacher, I guess that magazines don't like some letters, just like we don't like vegetables, because the one I'm with has no T!

Beyond the complicity and the exchange of secrets between the teacher and the pupils that this chronicle indicate, the circulation of different magazines in the classroom with the purpose of finding the teacher's name shows that the process of language teaching is extremely porous in the sense of it letting itself be penetrated by the most different use of language and, therefore, by the most diverse speech genres.

However, it does not seem to me that this porosity agrees with the idea that it would be a school's duty to introduce all speech genres in circulation in a given society to its students. If this were a mother's language teaching goal, it would never be possible for a student to finish his/her studies because he/she would always be "illiterate" in one of the spheres of social communication among the different fields of human activity. And more than that it would mean that it is the school's responsability to teach everything, as if one could not learn anything from life and establish relations that even the greatest educational program would not be able to handle.

It is not suitable to the primary school to teach all the different litteracies, in the meaning that we are regarding to "different" in this section. It is suitable for the school to recognize the multiplicity of genres and from it choose some – and, therefore, opt for some spheres of communication – which are essential. Among these it would certainly be the fields of literature and arts, because the access to such cultural goods, humanity's wealth, should be preferred by the school. One should not be afraid of learning from life and for this reason it would be a waste of time to be teaching how to "read an electricity invoice." This was a lesson that I have found in a textbook for 8/9-year-old kids. By the way, who, besides those who work with accounting, would call "a power bill" an "invoice"?

2 Social Inequalities and Literacy Levels

Let us start this section with a piece of a teacher's narrative:

I worked at a school in the outskirts, which was the farthest from the city center and was located in the poorest region of the city. It was bordered by a main avenue, but all the neighborhood streets were dirty. Very few houses were made of brick; the vast majority were shacks without sanitation or lighting. I daily faced two completly distinguished realities: In the mornings, I went to a private school, where all the students were clean, tidy and with their uniforms on. They had full lunch boxes and every sort of school supply. In the afternoons, poverty was daunting: The malnourished kids were hungry and wearing the slippers and the clothes they could find, which often were larger or smaller than they were. I crossed the city by car to get to school exactly at 1:00 p.m., the time when kids were arriving. As soon as they arrived, I took attendance and we had lunch. They ate a lot. Their relatives (adults and teenagers) used to stay outside the school gates, waiting for the kids to feel "satisfied" and to pass them a plate of food under the gate so they could also eat (BALSAMO, 2014, p.29-30, our translation

This recquires no further comments: there are not only diferences in society; there are inequalities. Differences enrich human experience; inequalities deform humanity.

In the press, two major economic groups, whose leaders participate in the movement "Todos pela educação" ["All for Education"], pointed out the reasons for their concern and engagement with education.

The other group owns a factory in a northeastern city in Brazil where the educational system is recently presented as a model: A country town where the factory employs more than 60% of the economically active workforce. Thanks to the state government incentives for education, its productivity has increased in the last years and the group's leader shows his satisfaction by having his factory located in this municipality.

The relationship between productivity and education is openly stated in these engagements and it shows how far the actual customers of the school system are from the public schools. For this reason, the concern with schooling emerged in recent decades, when the Brazilian elite stopped being exclusively constituted by landowners. Agribusiness and industry sectors gained ground in economic development in such a way that a modern capitalism arrives in the country and changes a little the narrow-minded national elite. However, this more modern capitalism meets a general lack of good basic education in Brazil, a historical damage that dates back to approximately 500 years ago. We must not forget the following figure: It was only in the last decade of the last century that we reached around 100% enrollments of school age children (and in that same year – 1998, more than three million kids were out of school!).

This social reality also produces "different" litteracies: A difference that is not an enriching one, but which is a consequence of inequality. And what does this have to do with literacy in contemporaneity?

Unfortunately, "reading and writing" plans that are proper to the social conditions and demands from the subjects that are recently going to school end up spreading different "litteracies levels," in such a way that in accordance to those levels even those who are unlettered can be considered "literate":

A final inference that can be drawn from the concept of literacy is that an individual who cannot read and write, that is, unlettered, is somehow literate (attributing to this adjective a meaning related to literacy). Thus, an adult may be unlettered, because he/she is socially and economically marginalized, but if he/she lives in an environment in which reading and writing have a strong presence and he/she is interested in listening to the newspaper reading done by a lettered person, if he/she receives letters and has others reading them to him/her and he/she dictates what a lettered person shoud write in the letters (and it is significant that, in general, he/she dictates using vocabulary and language structures that are proper for writing), if someone asks you to read warnings or indications that are affixed somewhere, this unlettered person is, somehow, literate, because he/she makes use of writing, engages in social practices of reading and writing (SOARES, 1998, p.24, our translaion

[...] what are the reading and writing skills that would make a person "literate"? What kind of written texts should a person be able to read and write in order to be considered "literate"?

The answers to the above questions are quite problematic. The skills that constitute litearcy are continously distributed; each point of this continous way indicates different kinds and levels of skills, abilities and knowledge, which can be employed to different kinds of written texts.

The key issue is that two distinguished realities are mixed up when one talks about different levels of literacy or about different literacies. The first involves every complex society, in a way that every subject is at the same time literate and iliterate, depending on the fields of activities, the knowledge that are demanded and the kind of language which is employed. The latter is a result of social inequality, which unevenly distributes cultural goods, in particular, those expressed by written language.

A school, no matter which school it is, should not adopt different levels of literacy for distinct social subjects. This would restrict some "adequate answers" in their social contexts whereas others would count with a literacy that allows them to comprehend the social relationships, to deepen them or to make efforts to change them in a critical way. A school should never aim at "proper answers," but at critical answers and, to reach critical awareness, it is necessary for the school to define itself as a teaching-learning place not of all fields of human activity (and, therefore, responsible for introducing all speech genres to the social subjects), but of socially deprived areas that enable the constitution of critical and ethically responsible subjects. I refer here to the concept of responsibility as it is found in Bakhtin (2010

REFERENCES

• BALSAMO, L. M. A avaliação da escola: um estudo sobre os sentidos produzidos nos sujeitos protagonistas de uma realidade escolar. Dissertação de mestrado em Educação, Universidade Federal de São Carlos, 2014.
• BAKHTIN, M. M. Para uma filosofia do ato responsável Trad. aos cuidados de Valdemir Miotello e Carlos Alberto Faraco. São Carlos: Pedro & João Editores, 2010.
• _______. Os gêneros do discurso. In: BAKHTIN, M. Estética da criação verbal 4. ed. Trad. Paulo Bezerra. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2003, p.261-306.
• BAKHTIN, M. (VOLOCHÍNOV). Marxismo e filosofia da linguagem Problemas fundamentais do método sociológico na ciência da linguagem. Trad. Michel Lahud e Yara Frateschi Vieira. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1982.
• CAMPOS, C. O gosto da revista Inédito, 2014.
• DINIZ, J. Uma família inglesa. Cenas da vida do Porto Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, s/data.
• GERALDI, J. W. Alfabetização e letramento: perguntas de um alfabetizado que lê. In: ZACCUR, E. (Org.). Alfabetização e letramento. O que muda quando muda o nome? Rio de Janeiro: Rovelle, 2011, p.13-32.
• SOARES, M. Letramento: um tema em três gêneros Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 1998.
• ZACCUR, E. (Org). Alfabetização e letramento. O que muda quando muda o nome? Rio de Janeiro: Rovelle, 2011.

¹

Introduction

²

It is an opposition that would mean considering the first as the new theory developed to replace the latter and its practices and to perform other ways of insertion into the world of writing and reading.

³

).

⁴

) "all the diverse areas of human activity involve the use of language" and these areas develop different speech genres. The more complex the society is, the more it diversifies its various possibilities of human activity and the more complex is the set of relatively stable types of utterances, or speech genres, in circulation.

⁵

) regarding the speech genres can teach us two lessons: a) the origin of each genre is so closely related to the needs of a field of human activity that within it several interconnected genres are developed; b) no field of human activity is isolated because all of them were also shaped by language and its functioning ways (for example, considering that the linguistic signs are historically and ideologically featured, no language activity can be neutral or detached from the social world).

⁶

⁷

).

⁸

One of them pointed to the fact that their industries in Brazil, although using the same technology of overseas factories, had lower productivity rate. It ordered a study of the diferences between them and it was pointed out that the only difference was the Brazilian workers' lower level of schooling in comparison to the workers from other countries where other production units of the group were located. As a solution to increase industrial productivity, the great entrepreneur developed an education plan for their employees, and today nobody is hired by the group without having at least finished High school, even for serving coffee.

⁹

).

¹⁰

¹¹

), that is: not a moral responsibility of one with oneself, but an ethical responsibility grounded on the relation with otherness.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  01 Dec 2014
• Date of issue
  Dec 2014

History

• Received
  05 June 2014
• Accepted
  28 Oct 2014