Literatura por quê?: os professores e a escolha de livros literários para indicação aos estudantes do 6º ano do Ensino Fundamental

Abstract

This research, which is in the field of Education and Language studies, started from the general objective of elucidating the criteria by which acting 6th grade Portuguesespeaking teachers in Middle School guide themselves when selecting literary titles for the reading of their students. Among the specific objectives, the research sought: to know the paths taken by the participating teachers in order to become readers of literature; to investigate the academic background of these subjects, in order to verify how/if discussions about the teaching of literature for the young was present throughout this process; to know the reality of the professional context of the investigated ones, seeking to perceive the presence or not of institutional direction for the work with literature in the 6th grade; to identify the books and authors that have been assigned by these teachers to the students of the studied stage of schooling; to know ways of circulation of the literary book and school activities promoted from the literature; to investigate reading practices that the subjects are currently experiencing. In order to achieve the objectives listed, a qualitative study was carried out, which, as a methodology for data collection, was used for interviews directed by a semistructured script. The corpus, composed of a total of eleven interviews with 9 teachers from schools belonging to different educational networks in Belo Horizonte, was analyzed in light of content analysis, as described by Bardin (2016). The theoretical framework of the study is composed, among other authors, of Paulino, Soares, Rosenblatt, Petit, Cosson, Lajolo, Batista and Candido. In general, the results indicate the multifaceted and subjective character of the processes for choosing literary works investigated. The data also reveal that, among the criteria by which the teachers investigated guide themselves when choosing the works that they assign to the 6th grade, the ones which stand out are: the adequacy to the reading public and the objectives of pedagogical order, established from the school curricula. The analysis of the set of titles commonly used by the subjects heard evidenced several tendencies and ways of conceiving the juvenile literature and its readers. Although, in the speeches collected with the interviews, the statement that literature is, in fact, only worked in High School (the stage in which a systematization of literary theory occurs), the study demonstrated that several proposals of literature teaching are today developed in 6th grade classes in Middle School, aiming at the seduction and the development of young readers, and signaling the need for the academia to dedicate itself more emphatically to understanding and discussing them