Histórias de pessoas surdas e minhas experiências com elas: desafios para viver práticas de letramentos acadêmicos

Abstract

One day, during a college class that discussed teaching and learning for deaf people, I found myself thinking about the following questions. What would it be like to have a deaf student in my class? How would I plan classes to be able to teach her or him? Therefore, I felt curious to know how deaf people build their knowledge, their literate practices at school, in higher education and in other non-school places. Time went by, I had the opportunity to have some experiences with deaf people while I was still an undergraduate and I started to study more about their education, specifically in the academic environment. Thus, considering the experiences I have experienced, this research aims to understand narratively what some academic literacy processes of deaf university students, participants in this research, are like, focusing on the experiences narrated by them during their academic life and more specifically discussing and analyzing these experiences. In this research, I adopt the theoreticalmethodological approach of narrative inquiry, as proposed by Clandinin and Connelly (2000; 2004; 2015), who argue that narratives are not only a study phenomenon, but also constitute the research method itself. To compose the field texts, I use narratives from deaf university students, my own narratives and compose meanings from these narratives following the proposal of Ely, Vinz, Downing and Anzul (2005). The study is based on aspects of inclusion and the need to be rethought (Sassaki, 2007; Orrú, 2017; Skliar, 2010), Bilingualism and its importance for deaf people (Morais; Martins, 2020; Probst, 2022) and on literacy (Botelho, 2002), literacies (Soares, 2003) and academic literacies (Street, 2006; 2014). Based on the narratives of Sávio, Gustavo and my own, I discuss topics such as: bilingual education, identity, stories to live by, authorship, academic literacy practices. At the end of my study, I learned to problematize inclusion and adopt a unique perspective in relation to others. This occurred through the practical experiences of academic literacy shared by deaf participants, as well as by examining the contexts that prevented the construction of these literate practices. Telling the participants' stories contributed to my reflection on inclusion and influenced my vision regarding my future professional practice.