Sharing textual graphic tools : early lessons in graphic language through practices in handwriting organization by teachers and pupils in schools in Recife

Abstract

By reflecting on the teaching and learning of the graphic language that occurs during the school trajectory of pupils, this thesis describes an investigation into teaching the visual organization of handwriting. Through the problematisation of the practices of literacy and ‘alfabetização’, we seek to understand the contents of and approaches to graphic language currently present in language education or in contemporary debates within this field. The field research was of an ethnographic nature, during which the activities of eight classes in the third year of elementary school in six public and private schools in the city of Recife were observed during ten days, each. During this period, the researcher conducted semi-structured and unstructured interviews and collected documents related to the school. The records (annotations, photos, videos) were structured in timelines describing and classifying the observed activities, which enabled us to identify recurrences. Thus, the analytical corpus was selected: records of handwritten texts produced by the polyvalent teachers and their respective copies by the pupils; as well as texts created and formatted by the pupils themselves. The activities were analysed observing the visual differentiations that occurred in the text - herein called textual graphical tools. They were identified, counted, and classified by their nature, function and application within the text, in a framework proposed through considerations from analytical models used by fields such as visual communication and rhetoric. Analysis of the graphical textual tools used by the teachers and pupils, of the practices observed and of the interviews indicates that the teaching of graphical variations in handwriting is chiefly conducted in an unsystematic manner, and that, pupils compose their repertoire of graphical information strategies from the writing practices of the teacher, although often combining, transforming or adapting them.