History taught: literacy practices and production of meaning

Abstract

The present study investigates the production of meaning in literacy practices in History education and it is shaped conceptually by the field of language drawn from the Bakhtin as its theoretical framework in interface with the curriculum itself. Therefore, many questions and possibilities stem from this conversation between the fields of language and the curriculum since knowledge is defined as a socially constituted production, structured by ideological signs in its social historicity and the classroom is conceived as a complex, multiple, hybrid and ambivalent space. This study focused on the 6th grade History lessons in classroom environment in an elementary state school in Rio de Janeiro / Baixada Fluminense in 2009 during a determined time. According to the theoretical perspective adopted, the statements are formed in the situated relational process as a social-cultural backcloth whereas the compositional scenario is directly related to the usage of utterances and their inter-subjective interactions. This theoretical approach allowed the coherent analysis of the literacy events materialized within the classroom space where the act of reading a book, copying from the board, writing on the notebook and answering a test are contextualized practices of/in a day-to-day school life.