Concepts and practices of literacy teachers: (mis)encounters in a formative process in search of meaning

Abstract

This article discusses concepts and practices developed by literacy teachers in the municipal public school system of a city in northern Paraná state, who participate in a study group sponsored by a public university in the same city. To analyze the (mis)matches in the training process, we begin with the assumption that pedagogical practices are guided by the teachers' concepts and guide their methodological choices for teaching reading and writing, ultimately directly impacting the relationships children establish with reading and writing, generating success or limitations in the literacy process. This is a critical-collaborative action research (Pimenta, 2005) and is anchored in the theoretical framework of scholars on literacy from a humanizing perspective, such as Arena (2010, 2021, 2024) and Miller (2020), in dialogue with Historical-Cultural Theory and Russian philosophers of language, such as Bakhtin and Voloshinov. The article concludes that, as teachers appropriate the theoretical principles that consider reading and writing as cultural, plural, social, and historical acts, which privilege the negotiation of meanings—and that these human acts are directly linked to life—they present gradual and conscious transformations in their pedagogical practice, discarding the supremacy of phoneticization and embracing the work with living characters and utterances.