A construção de chaves relacionais e oportunidades de aprendizagem através da leitura literária: análise de um caso expressivo

Abstract

This study presentes a telling case (MITCHELL, 1984) based on a literacy event (STREET, 1984) in which a teacher and students collectively read and discussed literary texts. This event, referred to as “mini poetry party” by participants, was developed in an online Portuguese (as first language) lesson during the period of emergency online instruction caused by the covid-19 pandemic. In building this telling case from an ethnographic perspective (GREEN; DIXON; ZAHARLICK, 2005), participant observation (SPRADLEY, 1980) of Portuguese lessons was conducted in three Brazilian 8th grade classrooms (in which students are typically 13 year-olds), situated in a university’s laboratory school in the state of Minas Gerais, over a school year (from April to December 2021). The general goal of the study was to build theoretically grounded interpretations about the construction of social conditions for students’ engagement in online literacy events, with special interest in the relational dimension of the interaction between teacher and learners. Following this path, analyses were based on the theoretical constructs of relational key (BEAUCHEMIN, 2019) and opportunities for learning (TUYAY; JENNINGS; DIXON, 1995), guided by the following specific goals: (i) to describe how the teacher and the students built a relational key of caring and warmth through their languaging actions; and (ii) to identify opportunities for learning built in the “mini poetry party”. Drawing on the microethnographic discourse analysis framework (BLOOME et al., 2022), this study analyzed transcriptions of sub-events within the mini poetry party, as well as a map of all the written texts shared during this event. These data were triangulated with other records generated through participant observation in those classrooms, such as field notes on other literacy events, didactic resources shared with students, interview records (FORSEY, 2008), texts written by students, among others. Analyses revealed that it was through the negotiation and renegotiation of the expectations for the task of collective reading of literary texts that the teacher proposed a relational key of care and warmth, which was acknowledged, identified, and sustained by students through their actions of sharing and presenting the texts they chose. Moreover, analyses indicated that, in this process, both teacher and learners sustained the aforementioned relational key through the interactional roles they undertook and the ways of interacting with and through written texts they developed throughout the “mini poetry party”. It was possible to identify the interactional construction of opportunities for learning which were inextricably tied to such relational key of care and warmth: the opportunity for students to see themselves as authors and/or curators of texts and the opportunity to enlist a conception of literature as a possible source of comfort in hard times and as a way to build bridges for the construction of intersubjective relationships.