Literacy is more than teaching a code: discourse and authorship in language teaching

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the use of the phonic method in literacy, preconized, in the midst of a “methods quarrel,” as the only evidence-based way to teach literacy. Although this discussion is not recent, from 2019 on, it gains strength by integrating the National Literacy Policy (PNA) [Portuguese acronym of the name], in a very controversial moment regarding the directions of education in the country. In this context, the discussion proposed here is based on the dialogue with authors such as Cecília Goulart, Magda Soares, João Wanderley Geraldi, among others who have dedicated their studies to literacy and contributed to the expansion of the debate on teaching of the mother tongue. Supported by these authors and by the Bakhtinian perspective on language, this article also presents pedagogical practices performed by undergraduate students of the Pedagogy course at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in the scope of the extension project “The school-university partnership in children’s literacy and the initial training of literacy teachers”, through which they are inserted into the daily life of public schools and participate in the planning and development of didactic projects focused on children’s literacy. From the proposed discussions in this article and the performance of the undergraduates, one can glimpse practices based on the discursiveness of human relations, which are shown to be potent for the valorization of children’s voices, their authorship as readers and writers, and their protagonism in the literacy process, seeking to expand their repertoire of cultural practices of reading and writing and their formation as socio-historical and cultural subjects in the struggle for social inclusion.