Eduardo S. Junqueira

Challenging the Boundaries between Standard and Popular Language Situated in Historical Contexts: The Communicative Practices of High-School Brazilian Students Crafting Hybrid Multi-Modal Ways with Words

This article presents the contextualised interpretive analysis of communicative practices (artefacts including a song and a comic strip) developed by economically disadvantaged secondary students from two Brazilian public schools. Students’ uses of standard and popular languages stretch and problematise social and cultural constructions about what it means to be ‘literate’ currently. The linguistic analysis and the inter-textual analysis of students’ multi-modal texts exposed the tensions and the intricacies between rigidly standardised mainstream norms of grammar and socially and culturally embedded textual production and language use at play in many K-12 schools. The analysis challenges current reductionist social conventions about cultural production and language use to further a conception of language that centers difference, change and creativity. It explores the complexity of the artefacts produced by the students according to their hybrid cultural practices, their context and their access to information and communication technologies (ICT). It indicates that students’ use of language and multi-modalities presented in the artefacts extrapolates narrow definitions imposed by social conventions about certain language uses (including grammar conventions) and communicative practices. This poses challenges to schools operating according to narrow, ideological conventions that may hurt students’ abilities to use language, to communicate and to learn.

Análise do uso de mensagens de celular na melhoria da participação de estudantes em cursos a distância: um estudo de caso

Estudos tem mostrado os beneficios das mensagens de celular na educacao. Pesquisadores argumentam que estudos devem ser conduzidos para se avaliar a extensao dos beneficios e melhor identificar em quais contextos as mensagens moveis sao aplicadas da melhor forma. Nesse sentido, esse artigo examinou a utilizacao das mensagens SMS em um curso a distância com 474 alunos. O principal objetivo foi descobrir se o uso desta tecnologia poderia melhorar a participacao dos estudantes no curso. Os estudantes foram divididos em dois grupos e os resultados mostram que os alunos que receberam as mensagens moveis tiveram resultados significativamente superiores aqueles que nao receberam, sendo quase 20% mais efetivos com relacao ao cumprimento das atividades e ate 78 horas mais rapidos para conclui-las.

Práticas de multiletramentos com laptops educacionais

O presente trabalho apresenta uma pratica com suporte de tecnologias digitais experimentada em sala de aula de uma escola participante do Projeto Um Computador por Aluno (UCA) na perspectiva da Pedagogia dos Multiletramentos e da Educomunicacao. O estudo acompanhou alunos do 6o ano em uma atividade de producao de slides, referenciada pelos estudantes como sendo uma das mais significativas realizadas na escola. Tal evento pode ser considerado como de multiletramento pelo uso de imagens e textos com significados diversos e ricos atribuidos pelos estudantes.

REFLEXÕES TEÓRICAS E PRÁTICAS SOBRE OS NOVOS LETRAMENTOS E TECNOLOGIAS DIGITAIS: RELATO DE FORMAÇÃO DOCENTE THEORETICAL REFLECTIONS AND PRACTICES RELATED TO NEW LITERACIES AND DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES: A TEACHER TRAINING REPORT

The paper presents the experience of teacher training conducted under the Mais Educacao (More Education) Program from the Ministry of Education, Brazil, and attended by a group of public school teachers in the state of Ceara in order to learn about digital technologies and new literacies. The course was developed in two units; the first one addressed conceptual elements related to teacher identity in transition and their new professional roles, the dissonance between the paradigm of cyberspace and the space-time of schools. The second unit featured a review of a practical experience in the use of digital technologies for educational purposes on a learning project developed in partnership with the University of Michigan, U.S.A., based on the contrasting experiences of two teachers. The course established reflexive dialogues with participating teachers, contributing to their understanding of the dilemmas and possible ways of acting in the Program to promote improved educational use of digital technologies. Keywords: Teacher training; Digital technologies; Integral education. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14244/19827199693

Book Review: Multimodal Pedagogies in Diverse Classrooms: Representation, Rights and Resources, the Digital Pencil: One-to-One Computing for Children, the Second Life Herald: The Virtual Tabloid That Witnessed the Dawn of the Metaverse, the Media and International Communication

Multimodality, which provides us with a new way to see texts, meaning-making and acts of communication in all its forms, has grown into a cutting-edge theoretical tool. Multimodal scholars have expanded the notion of ‘text’; while once it referred solely to static print, now the term ‘text’ can encompass images and layout (Kress, 2003, 2006), pedagogy (Lemke, 1990) and even schooling itself (Schleppegrell, 2004). Moreover, a theory of multimodality has expanded how we see language. Adding an explanation of how different linguistic and non-linguistic communicative forms combine to make meaning to the valuable work of the new literacy studies theorists, it has furthered the much-needed understanding that we can no longer look solely at texts in order to discern meaning (or meanings). Rather, multimodality reminds us that meaning is made by people, and we must examine how people use language with one another in order to understand texts, communication and the broader contexts of learning. Pippa Stein’s Multimodal Pedagogies in Diverse Classrooms: representation, rights and resources pushes this scholarship even further. She takes up ideas and terminologies that have become wellestablished concepts in multimodal studies but then extends them in new, interesting and necessary ways. For instance, ‘meaning potential’, a term from social semiotics, refers to the different ways that language could be used in any given situation – both what is used and what could have been used. Traditionally, the meaning potentials that are taken up by researchers have fallen within certain recognized parameters, namely gender, ethnicity, class and age. These parameters are too tidy, however, and it is this tidiness that Stein disrupts. She complicates what is studied under multimodality and what is seen as possible in student expression. Primarily, it is her focus on children who are often seen as living in desperate conditions of poverty, racism and violence in South Africa that marks a welcome – albeit sobering – departure from other multimodal scholarship. Rather than a focus on children in general (Lemke, 1990), the examples from one’s own children (Kress, 2006) or texts geared towards or about children (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2001), Stein focuses on the lives lived and the texts created by a very specific group of children: youth suffering poverty and violence in South Africa. She highlights how much meaning-making these children accomplish despite their conditions, which flouts any assumptions that these children are not as scholastically ‘capable’ as children who have more material advantages. Moreover, despite a key tenet of multimodality that meaning is created by people, many extant multimodal analyses nonetheless focus heavily on the products of textual production. Stein includes close analyses of artifacts herself but aims at moving beyond the text to also examine the social context surrounding its creation and reception. Therefore, her focus on the local situation of meaning-making is vital – it adds an in-depth exploration of social context that is often lacking in other multimodal analyses.