Volume 2019, Issue 259 - Special Issue: Literacy in the study of social change: Lusophone perspectives, Editors: Marilyn Martin-Jones, Izabel Magalhães and Mike Baynham

This article presents a historical analysis of discourses about language and literacy that have emerged during different periods in the political and cultural history of Portugal. It covers six periods, from the colonial era to the present, and it considers different geopolitical spaces, including the Portuguese mainland, the Atlantic archipelagos, former Portuguese colonies and diasporic spaces created as a result of emigration from Portugal. The article traces three kinds of discursive shift: (1) shifts in discourses in Portuguese society regarding the goals of language and literacy education, along with associated discourses about appropriate language and literacy pedagogies; (2) shifts in discourses about the specific nature and significance of literacy in Portuguese; and (3) shifts in discourses about the value and symbolic power of standardized forms of spoken and written Portuguese. It shows how each historical period has been characterized by distinctive political and ideological currents which have, in turn, shaped and re-shaped ways of thinking about the role of language and literacy education in the definition of citizenship and national identity, in the construction of heritage, in the creation of a “modern” democratic state and, more recently, in the retooling of human resources to create a flexible labour force.

This article contributes to the strand of research within the New Literacy Studies that has investigated the ways in which adult literacy campaigns are bound up with social and political movements. The focus is on the adult literacy campaign initiated in Timor-Leste in 1974, as the process of decolonisation from Portugal got underway. This campaign was based on a Freirean approach to adult literacy and was initiated by Timorese students returning from Lisbon. The article draws on archival research and oral history interviews with people who volunteered to serve as adult literacy tutors at the time. The analysis presented in the main body of the article provides insights into the nature of the training, and into the tutors’ own understandings of the purpose of the campaign and of adult literacy pedagogy. It also draws attention to the difficult conditions in which this short-lived campaign was conducted in 1974 and 1975. The final section of the article details the worsening nature of the conditions encountered after the Indonesian invasion of December 1975 and concludes that, despite the constraints imposed by these conditions, this campaign has had an enduring symbolic legacy in the field of adult literacy education in Timor-Leste.

This article is based on ethnographically-informed research carried out as part of a wider study of adult literacy education in Timor-Leste (Boon 2014). The research was designed as a multi-site and multi-scalar case study that was conducted in 2011. It included class observations and interviews with adult learners, teachers and coordinators who were involved in different types of literacy programs. In the article, I present some of the insights that I gleaned into the ways in which the research participants understood what it means to be literate, into their representations of the significance of involvement in literacy programs, into their understandings of the challenges and opportunities associated with such programs and into their discourses about literacy. The research findings are presented in three central sections of the article as follows: (1) literacy in the lives of adult learners; (2) teachers and coordinators navigating the challenges and opportunities of local literacy programs; and (3) teachers’ and coordinators’ discourses about adult literacy. The research presented here complements other research on adult literacy in Timor-Leste by building knowledge about what is happening “on the ground” in post-independence literacy programs.

Literacy is a contested word, as Brian Street said in his article “The meanings of literacy”, which appeared in 1999 in Literacy: an international handbook , the work he co-edited with Daniel Wagner and Richard Venezky. Its meaning varies across countries with different levels of schooling. There is also considerable variation in academic and popular senses of literacy. Dominant, formal, school literacies have had longstanding visibility in academic research and in official policies. However, there is now greater awareness and understanding of the discursive contrasts between school and home/community literacies, between dominant and vernacular literacies, between formal and informal literacies in the academy and in official policies. In this article, I distinguish between dominant discourses about literacy, on the one hand, and critical knowledge of literacy, on the other hand. I argue that they represent two very different perspectives in public debates on literacy. Taking account of the differences between these perspectives shows us how everyday life can be a space for struggle and contestation over meanings and for the construction of future discourses about literacy. I characterise the relationship between vernacular and dominant literacies by employing Jürgen Habermas’ constructs of lifeworld and systems, as he defined them in The theory of communicative action in 1987. I also employ part of the explanatory framework proposed for Critical Discourse Analysis by Lilie Chouliaraki and Norman Fairclough, in 1999, in Discourse in late modernity . In the central sections of the article, I then draw on ethnographic research, related to literacy, that I carried out in two socioeconomically differentiated neighbourhoods in Brazil. My discussion focuses on ideological issues related to literacy emerging from the ethnographic fieldwork in these two Brazilian neighbourhoods.

This article contrasts data from two ethnographic studies carried out at different points in time with working class families in Trombetas, a bairro on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, Brazil. The first study was conducted from 1988 to 1991, and the second in 2009. We develop two main themes: (1) the changing meanings of literacy in relation to the shift from Catholicism to Neo-Pentecostalism; and (2) the growing use of new technologies and multimodal means of communication in association with religious secular and commercial practices. For the first theme, we employ the notion of indexicality as a way of analyzing the changes taking place in this context. We point to the significant presence of Evangelical churches in Trombetas in 2009, and to the specific ways in which the reading and writing practices of some members of two families were bound up with religious beliefs and identities. In addressing the second theme, we draw attention to the meanings associated with the new technologies and the multimodal resources drawn upon by different family members in 2009. The article foregrounds the advantages that accrue from adopting a Literacy Studies perspective – one that focuses on the ways in which research participants, of different generations, actively pursue their own purposes (religious, secular or commercial), drawing on the modes of communication available to them and one that reveals the diversity and complexity of actual practices on the ground in local settings such as that of Trombetas.

This article examines policy change in special education in Brazil, with regard to educational provision for learners with special needs. There has been a far-reaching policy shift from educational provision for such learners in special schools to provision in mainstream schools. The focus of the research reported here was on particular educational settings, schools and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Brazil. The research provided insights into the different discourses about inclusion that circulated in these settings and into the limited nature of capacity-building for teachers. It also showed that some teachers and educational practitioners (e.g. peripatetic support staff) were devising inclusive pedagogic practice by drawing on different textual and multimodal resources, thereby demonstrating individual agency and reflexivity. At the same time, they were constrained by the paperwork demands associated with the management and monitoring of policy change. These managerial constraints are illustrated here, with reference to the institutional practices, the particular literacy events, and the power asymmetries involved in the production of student evaluations. The article highlights the value of taking account of situated literacy practices and the uses of particular kinds of texts and genres in ethnographic research into educational policy processes, as well as analyzing policy discourses.

Eastern European migration to Portugal is a relatively recent yet significant phenomenon due to its impact on national legislation and discourses about language, citizenship and identity. Along with other migration movements to Portugal, it has also brought about changes in state policies. The monolingual order within the Portuguese education system has been reinforced through the adoption of the notion of ‘Portuguese as a non-native language’ and the creation of different categories of speakers of ‘other’ languages. While these discourses predominate within the national educational system, other discursive spaces (such as complementary schools and playgroups) are being constructed, on the margins of Portuguese society, where other languages and literacies are being learned and used, alongside Portuguese. This paper presents some insights from longitudinal ethnographic research (2004–2013) that was carried out in a complementary school for Russian-speaking children in Portugal run by their parents and grandparents. It looks into the complex ways in which literacy ideologies and practices were reproduced, contested and negotiated in this particular discursive space. It also shows how students drew on the language, literacy and semiotic resources within their communicative repertoires in different ways as they responded agentively to tasks set by the teacher. The paper concludes with reflections on the potential of the complementary school as a “safe space” for fostering flexible multilingual pedagogies.