Literacy and the teachers education: the experience of a literacy research group

Abstract

The objective of this article is to discuss, from the discourse perspective, the experience of training literacy teachers carried out in the Group of Study and Research on Reading, Writing and Literacy in the Amazonia (Grupo de Estudo e Pesquisa em Leitura, Escrita e Alfabetização na Amazônia-LEIAA) during the period of the Covid-19 Pandemic. The group, which is quite heterogeneous, is made up of teachers from higher education, basic education, early childhood education, future literacy teachers, pedagogical coordinators, literacy professionals, two graduate scholarship students linked to the Institutional Program for Scholarship Initiation to Teaching (a master's degree student and a doctoral student) from the Post-Education Program of the Federal University of Pará, conducting research in literacy-related areas. The goal was to build with the participants a formative space that would allow redirecting the experiences to analyze what was lived in a conscious and critical way in an effort to try to reverse the order of what was already being done in the short-term courses, besides trying to relate theory to practice. The results of this experience indicated that the research group was an important formative space marked by sharing, by the unusual, by the uncertainties and by the mutual learning between educators and literacy teachers. This experience showed that teachers are subjects of training, with distinct experiences and that each one of them can be object of research, study and questioning to better understand them. Thus, teachers in training provoke and challenge us to unlearn and change our beliefs built for so long during our own formative processes.