Narrativas de docentes alfabetizadores/as no Brasil: a oralidade na formação, nos saberes e nas práticas

Abstract

The present study was carried out with the support of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), through the Graduate Program in Education (PPGED) at the Federal University of Uberlândia (UFU), within the research line “Educational Knowledge and Practices,” focusing on orality in children’s literacy. The study was justified by the idea that literacy in Brazil is mainly based on writing and on the sound produced when decoding written symbols, in which orality is undervalued and mechanized due to the legacy of hegemonic colonialist practices, silencing voices and increasingly creating space for the colonialism of the other. The central research question addressed in this study was: in what ways do literacy teachers, working within different Brazilian cultural contexts, understand orality in their literacy practices? The general objective of the research was to understand how literacy teachers from Brazilian schools, inserted in different cultural realities, include and develop pedagogical work with orality in classrooms with children undergoing the literacy process. The specific objectives were: i) To analyze teachers’ conceptions of orality and how these conceptions are manifested in their pedagogical practices in literacy education; ii) To identify the strategies and actions teachers use to include orality in the classroom, considering the relationship between orality, writing, and other forms of language; iii) To investigate how different cultural contexts, such as rural, quilombola, Indigenous, and urban settings, influence teachers’ knowledge and practices related to valuing orality in the literacy process; iv) To understand the challenges and resistance teachers face when working with orality in literacy education, including the culture of silence and criticism from colleagues; v) To explore how teachers’ life experiences and their initial and continuing education shaped their knowledge and influenced their approaches to orality in literacy education. This research has a qualitative nature and, therefore, bibliographic surveys were conducted for the state of the art through scientific text platforms such as the Brazilian Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (BDTD) and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES). Reflective interviews were also conducted, and categories that intertwined and diverged were analyzed. The theoretical framework used to support this study included the authors Arena and Arena (2024), Freire (1987 and 1996), Kilomba (2020), Marcuschi (1997, 2003, and 2010), Mortatti (2006 and 2009), and hooks (2013). We concluded that working with orality in literacy education requires both initial and continuing teacher education focused on this theme. We also revealed that orality is a complex social practice used within power relations and within a colonizing process.