Alfabetização de alunos com histórico de multirrepetência escolar: análise de uma intervenção pedagógica.

Abstract

The present work is the result of a research-action carried out with pupils attending the first years of Ensino Fundamental, in a municipal school, in the city of Rio Grande – RS, during the year of 2005. Its main objectives were to describe and analyze the literacy process that took place in a group of pupils whose schooling history was marked by academic failure, having repeated, at least two consecutive times, the literacy class. The pedagogic aims of the work presented here, which has been theoretically supported by Socio-historic Psychology and by language studies, were to contribute to the development of reading and writing processes in these children, as well as improving their self-esteem, shaken by repeated academic failure. In this sense, three activities were selected for analyzes in this dissertation: 1) the production of a comics book, by the whole class; 2) the creation of stories generated by pupils’ drawings and 3) an activity, involving the borough where pupils lived. The analysis of the experience was carried out through the contents of a field diary (where the teacher registered the description and her reflections about the pedagogic work she organized). In addition to that, three other kinds of documents, produced during the academic year, were analyzed: work produced by the pupils, teacher’s lesson plans, and the three evaluation reports (instruments written at the end of each trimester with the objective of informing pupils’ families about the work carried out in class and about children’s performance during the period). They articulated the data springing from the other two sources. Since the general purpose of the work was to examine the pedagogic practice focusing on children’s learning (using their work as illustration of such learning), two main axes were used as guides: the cognitive and the affective. Each axis included the following themes: academic development, emphasizing reading, was focused on the cognitive axe, and development/improvement of self-esteem, in this case related to academic failure, was focused on the affective axis. Data suggests that the work was successful, causing improvement in the reading performance of the majority of pupils (eight out of twelve) as well as in terms of increasing their motivation to be in school, originated from the general increase in the their self-esteem. The work shows the importance of using different languages in school, in order to value the different cultural universes of children and, through the promotion of a high self-esteem, help them to overcome their difficulties in a pleasant and playful manner.