Literacy and culture: for other possibilities of meaning in the processes of learning to read and write

Abstract

In this essay, we propose thinking about teaching how to read and write as culture (Bhabha, 2007), in dialogue with the theoretical references we have used to think about the curriculum (Lopes; Macedo, 2011) and the functioning of teaching how to read and write policies that we read as curricular texts. In this sense, we present a reflection that focuses on the tensions over the process of learning to read and write in the arrangements of recent education policies, which mobilize the discussion about learning how to read and write in childhood. To this end, we delve into the reading of policies that deal with the teaching how to read and write as discursive productions, understanding that they produce meanings and significations in the curriculum. Our methodological choices are based on problematizing the idea of a single answer, adequate at a national level. What does it mean to think of a single curriculum for teaching how to read and write? The attempt to establish a single meaning for teaching how to read and write underpins the production of the most recent policies, which bring with them a compensatory and salvationist character, reducing other possibilities for the meaning of reading and writing processes beyond what is currently being proposed. Therefore, our intention in this essay is to discuss teaching how to read and write as culture/enunciation, in order to problematize aspects that involve the attempt to establish meanings for what is meant by being someone who knows how to read and write in recent policies, pointing out that establishing a single national policy for teaching/learning how to read and write is impossible.