Crianças, docências, leitura e escrita: um estudo sobre o Pacto Nacional Pela Alfabetização Na Idade Certa - PNAIC

Abstract

This research had as study object the Portuguese literacy books belonging to the National Pact for Literacy in the Correct Age (PNAIC), a public policy of the federal government, focusing on the training of literacy teachers (from 1st to 3rd grade), which intends to ensure that all Brazilian children are literate until the age of 8; at the end of the 3rd year of elementary school. The central/general purpose of the research was to analyze how the PNAIC, through the Portuguese literacy books, concepts children and designs their reading and writing learning, in the 1st year of elementary school. The choice for examining this year of schooling was due to our interest in knowing better the meaning of teaching children and their learning, since the extension of elementary school period to nine years, and the anticipation of the beginning of primary education to 6-year-old children. Trying to understand meanings and senses, in the continuing education material for teachers in the PNAIC, this investigation was structured as a Documental Research, characterized by the following procedures: reading all the material produced for PNAIC (primary sources), totaling 24 books, with emphasis on the analysis of the 8 books used for training teachers of the 1st year of primary school, especially the units 1, 2 and 4, due to the aim of this research, and also academic works which, directly or indirectly, discuss aspects of PNAIC (secondary sources). According to the undertaken analysis, we detected the presence of a guiding dominant discourse on teaching practices and regulation of children's learning time, sustained on children’s right of learning, defining what, how and when they should learn, and so naturalizing and standardizing what, how and when teacher should teach. In this organization, the learning of the language was presented fragmented and normative, setting the principles of introducing, deepening and consolidating knowledge, skills and attitudes in each grade. This way, the planning of the literacy process and the teaching and the learning Portuguese is dedicated exclusively to the constituent axes of language (reading; written text production; orality; linguistic analysis: discursivity, textuality and normativity; and linguistic analysis: alphabetic writing system appropriation), excluding, therefore, the 6-yearold children characteristics, in the organization of school space-time, the manifestation of other languages and their incorporation into school routines, contributing to a depreciation of playing and a detachment from children's needs. In the PNAIC proposal for the 1st year of primary school, the teaching work with other languages was not encouraged, and the focus was always on teaching the Portuguese language. We stress that the playing, children’s main activity and their right, is being mischaracterized due to the demands of elementary school. We conjecture that the process of teaching reading and writing to 6-year-old children, crossed over by a defined time for learning and educational practices that ignore the plurality of languages in childhood, could bring negative consequences for their development, for example, the negation or depreciation of the time of childhood and (re)production of more failures at school. As for teachers, it could bring the adoption of massed training practices, produced and managed by experts, far from the subjects’ school daily routine.