cultural literacy !

Paedagogica Historica Vol. 44, Nos. 1–2, February–April 2008, 179–191

ISSN 0030-9230 print/ISSN 1477-674X online © 2008 Stichting Paedagogica Historica DOI: 10.1080/00309230701865561 http://www.informaworld.com

Knowledges and practices of successful literacy teachers (Brazil, 1950–1980)1

Maria Iolanda Monteiro* and Belmira Oliveira Bueno

Taylor and FrancisCPDH_A_286725.sgm10.1080/00309230701865561Paedagogica Historica0030-9230 (print)/1477-674X (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis441/2000000February 2008Maria [email protected]

Significant changes have marked Brazilian education in the period focused on by this research. Aiming to understand the configurations of the teaching profession in that period, this work focuses on the issue of the school success in the area of literacy by means of an analysis of the practices of literacy teachers who were at work between the 1950s and 1980s. The research is based on life-history accounts. The study aimed at describing the various experiences of these teachers identifying the knowledges and practices that sustained their successful literacy work as well as the various factors of a social, religious, political, familiar or other nature that, in the history of each of these teachers, favoured the development of a pedagogical style of literacy particular to each one of them. Despite the peculiarities and originality of each history, the success in the literacy process, as the defining feature of the profile of the four teachers, results from two main aspects: first, the autonomy that each one managed to keep in the development of his/her teaching work, particularly in the organisation of the teaching practices that indicated greater chances of a pupil’s learning to read and write; second, their trust in the capacity of every child for learning, independently of his/her social, economic and cultural conditions. Based on this evidence it is argued that the success of the pedagogical work, particularly during the early years of schooling, lies in an ethics of the teaching work with a double implication: first, it requires the teachers’ dedication to their pupils, and second, it requires respect for the work of the teacher, so that she/he can maintain her/his autonomy and inventiveness. These aspects indicate the need for reflection on teaching work and a review of current teacher education policies, particularly the policies targeted at teachers working with literacy practices.

Keywords: successful literacy teachers; life history; educational knowledges; pedagogical autonomy; teaching practices

Significant changes marked Brazilian education in the period focused on in this study. Such changes started from the beginning of the 1960s, with the approval of the General Law for Educa- tion (Diretrizes e Bases da Educação Nacional, Law no. 4024/1961), and they increased in the 1970s with the implantation of the reform that restructured the education system, instituting the school at primary and secondary level (Law 5692/1971). When unifying both the old primary school and middle school and enlarging compulsory schooling from four to eight years, such changes made official a new way of looking at formal education. However, those resolutions brought many conflicts and difficulties, especially for the teachers, with the admission of a great number of students who had been marginalised from the school system in Brazil.

The policies related to the largest democratisation of education had already been announced since the previous period. In fact, at the beginning of the 1960s a people were already looking for a redefinition of educational values and objectives. The country tried to follow the path of devel- opment of industrialisation, and the school was taken as a supporting and acceleration factor in

* Email: [email protected] 1 We would like to thank FAPESP (Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo/State of

São Paulo Research Foundation) for financial support of this research.

180 M.I. Monteiro and B.O. Bueno

that process. However, in the course of events the democratisation process has not, as expected, followed that direction. As regards the teachers, the changes reverberated negatively on their professional status, due to the progressive loss of the social recognition which they had enjoyed until then. Criticism of teachers’ poor training and performance started to be more frequent, which imposed the need for a new elaboration of their values and knowledge in order to better adapt to the new students’ profile – they were mostly from the poorer social classes – after this period.

Although the 1960s and 1970s were marked by a great emphasis on the value of scientific knowledge, searching to equalise and rationalise education, the spread of this knowledge and the way it reached the teachers meant that the conceptions regarding the use of science and its tech- niques were appropriated in several ways by the teachers, from those who defended strongly rationalising propositions to those who withdrew from them, denying and rejecting them. However, the technicist view prevailed, in which the teachers’ knowledge and experience were largely despised.2 Among those who did not incorporate the technicist view there were some teachers, or groups of them, that created new paths and their own ways of teaching.

It is to these teachers that this work turned its attention, with the objective of identifying the knowledge and practices which characterise the work of four beginning literacy teachers who taught in Brazil between the 1950s and 1980s. It analyses the social, family, religious and political factors which favoured these teachers developing a particular style of teaching literacy and their successful work.3

Life history as a methodological approach

In order to accomplish this study, seven narratives were collected from former beginning literacy teachers; however, to avoid repetition, we opted to work with only four of them. To find the teach- ers, the researchers counted on the collaboration of several people who had been witness to their professional work and recognised them as successful beginning literacy teachers. The choices were also based on the teachers’ self-image. All of them admitted that their careers were marked by success, notably in literacy work.

We were interested in understanding then how these teachers built their successful paths. What were their conceptions of education and what values supported their teaching practices? What influences did they receive during their lives and how did these impact on their professional work?

Except for one, all the oral accounts were recorded. For the analysis, several kinds of written documents were also used, many of them given by the teachers themselves. Only Mrs Eugênia, now 80 years old, did not authorise the recording. However, on her own initiative she wrote a text in which she set out her pedagogical principles and conceptions, and did not oppose us taking notes throughout the two long conversations we had. Moreover, she offered us several personal documents, such as newspaper clippings; her grade reports from primary school; photographs;

2 Elza Pino Dos Santos, “Professoras em Tempos de Mudanças. Trabalho Docente na Rede Pública de Educação do Estado de São Paulo (1960–80)” (Teachers in Changing Times. Teaching Work in the Public System in the State of São Paulo (1960–80)) (MA thesis, University of São Paulo, 2003); E.P. Santos and B. Bueno, “Trabalho Docente e Tecnicismo: A Experiência de Professsoras Primárias no Estado de São Paulo (1960–1980)” [Teaching Work and Technicism: Primary Teachers’ Experience in the State of São Paulo (1960–1980)] (paper presented at the 27th Annual Meeting of ANPEd [National Association for Research and Education], Caxambu, Brazil, October 2004).

3 Maria Iolanda Monteiro, “Histórias de Vida: Saberes e Práticas de Alfabetizadoras Bem Sucedidas” [Life Histories: Knowledges and Practices of Successful Literacy Teachers] (PhD diss., University of São Paulo, 2006).

Paedagogica Historica 181

prizes she won; besides a precious class diary containing details of literacy lessons she used to prepare for her pupils.

The use of life histories in this study is based on Bertaux’s and Ferrarotti’s conceptions, besides other authors from the educational field, such as Nóvoa and Goodson.4 When distinguish- ing life stories from life histories, Bertaux shows that the histories correspond to wider work. The life histories consider the life stories – oral or written – but complement them with other docu- ments, in order to study one person’s or one group’s life. He observes that the invention of the tape recorder modified in a subtle but substantial way the life stories as a kind of data, because, “while written autobiographies have only one author, tape-recorded life stories are the result of an interaction between two persons”. For Bertaux this aspect concerns more than an issue of reliability, because what really matters is the relationship between the researcher and the people who make his/her work possible when they accept to be interviewed about their life experiences and, “in a larger sense, the relationship between sociology and society, between the quest for knowledge about socio-structural relations and the various social groups that proceed from these relations”.5

In this way, the life histories analysed in this work portray more than particular paths, since they are related to the education and socialisation processes which are representative of a certain period. According to Ferrarotti, we argue that the teachers’ practices reveal their perceptions concerning social relationships as well as the social structures themselves. In this sense, the life histories from this study favoured better comprehension of the Brazilian school culture character- istic of the period analysed.

Nevertheless, in spite of the heuristic value of the life histories, the approach presented some constraints, mainly because of working with one type of selected file.6 Despite the precautions taken, the oral narratives were certainly liable to distortions. It is not improbable that the teachers could have involuntarily tried to make their memories coincide with the researchers’ supposed expectations. After all, their images and self-esteem were being evaluated. Besides, we need to consider that the narration of their experiences usually leads people to interpose reality and fiction. In order to minimise these limits, we worked with various life histories, confronting and comparing them in the search for common and convergent points.

The beginning literacy teachers: a brief profile

In order to improve the understanding of the analysis, we first present a brief description of the four teachers with their true names, as they requested.

Mrs Eugênia, the oldest of the group, was born in 1927, in Itapetininga, a town in the state of São Paulo. Since she was a child, she used to identify herself with an educational vocation. The strict contact with her siblings, and later following them in their schooling, contributed to her choice of that path. In 1945 she received her diploma as a primary teacher from one of the old and highly esteemed Normal Schools in the state of São Paulo. She took retirement in 1975, after having been working as a literacy teacher for almost 30 years. Today she teaches at home. She

4 Daniel Bertaux, ed., Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1981); Franco Ferrarotti, “On the Autonomy of the Biographical Method,” in Biography and Society: The Life History Approach in the Social Sciences, ed. D. Bertaux (Beverly Hills: Sage Studies in International Sociology and the International Sociological Association, 1981), 19–27; Ivor Goodson, “Studying the teacher’s life and work,” Teaching and Teacher Education 10, no. 1, (1994): 29–37; António Nóvoa, Vidas de Professores [Teachers’ Lives] (Porto: Porto Editora, 1992).

5 Bertaux, Biography and Society, 7–9. 6 Jean-Jacques Becker, “Le handicap de l’a posteriori,” Les cahiers de L’IHTP 4 (June 1987): 95–7.

182 M.I. Monteiro and B.O. Bueno

worked with children from rural settings, children from the Brazilian north-east dry area, from slums and orphanages, from poor and rich, educated and important families. She says she found in all the social and economic classes children who learned with joy and without any troubles, as well as children who presented difficulties. Eugênia has never married.

Mrs Maria da Conceição was born in 1929, in Araraquara, in the state of São Paulo. She attended a religious Normal School. She says her tendency towards an educational career was manifested long before she went to the Normal School. She received great incentive from her relatives to attend a university, but her choice of primary teaching made her repeatedly refuse that path. She preferred to be specialised by means of readings and courses, directing them to the work she had chosen as a primary teacher. She began work in 1952. She worked for 27 years in public schools, 23 of those dedicated to beginning literacy. After retirement, she worked in private schools; she owned a school and was its pedagogical coordinator. In summary, she had done 40 years of teaching work. She also has never married.

Mrs Oracy was born in 1937, in Cafelândia, in the state of Paraná, but she had always taught in São Paulo state. She attended Normal School but a Catholic school, graduating in 1955. Her choice of an educational career was due to the expectation of having to start work earlier, because she had to sustain herself. During her professional career she found she had made a happy choice. She realised that the strict contact with her nephews and nieces, the moving from city to city, as well as the fact of being a teacher who worked with children with special needs and a school principal, among other experiences, enabled her to develop abilities to deal with children and to gain a wider understanding of education. In 1964 she undertook a course of school administration (middle school level); and in 1973 she went to college to attend a Pedagogy course. She got married when she was 39 years old.

Mrs Rosa, granddaughter of a Japanese family, was born in 1948 in Suzano, in the state of São Paulo. She was raised by a Japanese traditional family, receiving a strict education. Schooling was hard for her, as she had to be taught the Portuguese alphabet. enrolment in the Normal School took place without any enthusiasm, because her father did not let her choose any other career. She graduated as a teacher in 1968 and then she went to college, to do a Pedagogy course. She thinks she received a critical education at university. She was president of the Students’ Academic Directory and claimed better educational conditions for them. She says that only through her teaching experience did she realise she had made the right professional choice. Her training included a trip to Japan to get to know that country’s teaching. She recently became a widow after 27 years of marriage.

The literacy teachers’ teaching knowledge

The analysis of this theme focused on the multiplicity of contextual conditionings that these four teachers experienced during their work as literacy teachers, in the acquisition and the develop- ment of a body of knowledge that sustained the work of teaching children how to read and write. Although the references are not constant, two main concepts were widely used in the analyses: the concept of habitus by Bourdieu and Lahire and that of teaching knowledges by Tardif.7 We emphasised the plural and temporary aspects of the types of knowledge, studying them in their

7 Pierre Bourdieu, Ce Que Parler Veut Dire: L’Economie des Echanges Linguistiques (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1982); Bourdieu, ed., La Misère du Monde (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1993); id., Raisons Pratiques: Sur la Théorie de l’Action (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1994); Bernard Lahire, Homem Plural: Os Determinantes da Ação [L’Homme Pluriel: Les ressorts de l’Action], trans. A. Clasen (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2002); Maurice Tardif, Saberes Docentes e Formação Profissional [Teaching Knowledges and Professional Formation] (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2003).

Paedagogica Historica 183

construction process during the several moments of the teachers’ life, in order to try to understand the way such knowledge contributed to the organisation of their educational work.

The study of the literacy teachers’ life history showed that several types of knowledge accu- mulated by them during their life – since their preschool childhood, their education period in Normal School and their professional life – were relevant in the structure of their successful educational work. It was possible to observe, for instance, that the situations that were cultivated in the area of the family and the school atmosphere instilled values that, later, formed the basis of several types of teaching knowledge, which were manifested in a plurality of practices. We observed that the knowledge of practice accomplished in the classroom with the students was built based on the articulation of knowledge from several periods in the educators’ lives, and we verified that this knowledge was the expression of a habitus that allowed each to compose a teaching style.

The study of the literacy teachers’ knowledge used in the configuration of their classes showed that “to know how to work” does not just depend on the knowledge directly related to educational work, but also on the knowledge acquired throughout life, from childhood to professional experience, that assumes different weight and makes a specific contribution, in each case. In the cases analysed, the knowledge obtained in the childhood, for instance, contributed to solidify the construction of a life ethics that contributed much to relationships that the teachers developed with their students during their professional work. Those situations favoured the development of positive values related to the school and the teaching profession, and were also present in the foundations of their conceptions regarding education and teaching. The relationship with certain people in the family in that period allowed the incorporation of attitudes that the teachers used as reference in order to rethink pedagogical activities and build their own educational practices, always seeking the development of good work and good rela- tionships with the students. That coexistence strengthened the accumulation of cultural capital that assured them a great disposition to react toughly when facing the obstacles of the profes- sion that were always considered by them as important challenges for the students’ and their own growth.

In fact, those aspects confirm one of Bourdieu’s theories, with regard to the decisive role of the family in the maintenance of the social order, once it is “one of the places of capital accumu- lation par excellence under their different types and transmission among the generations”.8 Like- wise, Lahire also emphasises the family contribution to the processes of “incorporation– interiorization–internalization” that allow the continuity of relationships with the social world and with others. According to him:

… the child, the adolescent and, then, the adult do not incorporate, properly speaking, “social struc- tures”, but corporal, cognitive, evaluative, appreciative, etc. habits, that is, action schemes which are adapted (and sometimes limited) means of doing, thinking, feeling and saying to specific social contexts. They internalize means of action, interaction, reaction, appreciation, orientation, percep- tion, categorization, etc., slowly entering in the social relationships of interdependence with other actors or entertaining, by the other actors’ mediation, relationships with multiple objects, whose mean or means of use, mean or means of appropriation, they learn.9

In the study undertaken, such processes could be observed to confirm that certain types of knowl- edge originating from attitudes, explanations, demands, relationships and positioning belonging to those close to the educators, modelled on a professional habitus. Such knowledge references appeared to be indispensable for the four literacy teachers’ reflection on and exercise of their educational work. The family became responsible for the transmission of the symbolic capital that

8 Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques, 131. 9 Lahire, Homem Plural, 173.

184 M.I. Monteiro and B.O. Bueno

made them form a family habitus that included many religious values. That situation favoured the incorporation of relationship models influenced by the need to practise, in daily and professional life, acquired principles related to religion.

The opportunity to live with nephews and younger siblings, for instance, taking care of and teaching them, allowed some of the literacy teachers to develop respectful conduct regarding children, ruled by ethical principles. That experience was equally responsible for the information they acquired about the children, and for the interest they developed in the teaching of reading and writing, preferably in beginning literacy classes. We can verify, then, that the knowledge, the culture and the personal values acquired throughout life, even prior to their professional experience, exerted a strong influence on the teaching they accomplished.

Another example refers to the disagreement, and even indignation, they manifested in relation to the punitive practices and attitudes they saw in other colleagues or in the school management, the boring and meaningless exercises, and the unfair and discriminatory situations of prejudice that disrespected and did not welcome students who were different. Such situations had provoked resistance since they were students in primary school, which was later maintained because they believed in educational work. When remembering their school experiences, they developed a conscience inasmuch as their students could feel the same discomfort and suffering they had felt when they were children, leading them to worry about organising their class dynamics in a different way. Taking as support the experience of “uneasiness at school” they intended to build the students’ “school welfare”.10

The Normal School was a decisive moment in that course of acquisition of knowledge, when the four educators were confronted with the perspective of professional accomplishment. The course constituted a very important formative moment, among other reasons because it was in that context that they appropriated knowledge related to school contents and the art of teaching, developing abilities that supported the teaching exercise. All the teachers studied mentioned teachers they retained in their memories, which became important reference models for their class structure, the relationship with the students and their pedagogical practices. There were positive and negative memories. All these, by their example or counterexample, seemed to support the exercise of their educational work, especially in avoiding the practices that would have negative repercussions on the students.

It was in the context of the Normal School that the four educators began to process the articulation of the knowledge obtained thus far with that of a pedagogic-scientific nature with which they were having contact for the first time. Their statements showed that the first rehearsals towards the structure of their professional conduct started to happen in that period. They began, for instance, to identify with certain methodologies, choosing certain teaching styles and taking them as models. Several times in the interviews, they emphasised the contribution of the Normal School in their training; however, they observed that the course did not entirely prepare them for the exercise of the profession. So, the beginning of teaching work opened up another level of conscience, because they could start to analyse the knowl- edge they had accumulated inside and outside the school, before their arrival in the Normal School. In the daily classroom routine, with their students, they could review their conceptions about school success and failure and analyse the factors that contributed to the students’ greater efficiency.

The conscience of their unfinished training led them always to seek other sources of informa- tion, to discover their colleagues’ experience, especially in successful teaching situations, theo- retical readings on child development etc. That feeling of unfinished training has been present

10 Bourdieu, La Misère du Monde.

Paedagogica Historica 185

throughout their entire teaching career, but at different intensity depending on the timing of experience that allowed them to make more reliable choices and decisions. The interest in enlarging their knowledge led them frequently to seek courses that could offer them a different educational perspective, which pointed to new pedagogical perspectives. Consciousness of the importance of theoretical readings in the educational area was emphasised as an aspect that sustained them in the profession.

In that context, besides the lessons, the planning, the regulations and the anticipated programmes, the literacy teachers accomplished different pedagogical work that was far from the stereotyped models, especially those pre-established by the bureaucratic organs of the educa- tional system. The plurality of experiences allowed the establishment of a professional ethics guided by a model of “ideal educator”, in which the student was the priority. Therefore, conscious of the functions of their teaching work, they organised teaching practices committed to the children’s learning, taking the responsibility for the level of quality and efficiency and for the students’ happiness in the school.

When considering the teachers’ work and life analysed in this study, we confirmed that a multiplicity of types of knowledge and of different temporalities plays an important role when we define professional competence. The set of types of knowledge that originated from the several time periods in the teachers’ lives was always questioned by them, so they could select the knowl- edge that was compatible with their personality, educational training, professional experience and educational ideals. The dynamics of each educational context motivated them to adapt themselves to certain routines, creating practices to pursue at that specific school, with its own demands and particularities.

A complete perception of their educational work allowed the literacy teachers to be critical of the educational changes and teaching situations, confidently justifying their choices and options for certain methodologies. The experiences obtained in the several instances contributed to the systemisation of knowledge, defining which elements would be more relevant for the students’ learning of reading and writing but through diversified and heterogeneous practices. The diffi- culty of teaching all the students motivated the teachers to seek other methodological procedures, guaranteeing all the children’s learning. The reflections they frequently made on their beginning literacy practices and the students’ evaluations led them to adopt individualised pedagogical work, as will be shown next.

The permanent search for professional improvement, through the relationship with experi- enced teachers and through the specialised readings on several dimensions of the educational work and learning, facilitated the articulation of knowledge. That process unchained a develop- ment in the profession, because they could always think up different, curious and challenging practices of teaching.

Successful literacy practices

Focusing on the analysis of successful literacy practices, it is now intended to further the under- standing of the school success resulting from the educational work developed by the four teachers focused on in this study. For a better understanding of how the educational knowledge is articu- lated and how it supports the practices of the literacy teachers, alongside this analysis we call attention to some aspects such as the initial practices for the school year, basic abilities for the teaching of reading and writing, the methodological procedures of beginning literacy, evaluation and motivating practices. The goal is to emphasise the way the teachers noted the educational work and the objectives of beginning literacy.

One of the remarkable aspects in this study was that the work of the literacy teachers studied was characterised by diversified practices, whose meanings are very close to the literacy

186 M.I. Monteiro and B.O. Bueno

conception that was previously spread and established in Brazil.11 That is to say, the pedagogical work they developed included practices beyond the process of beginning literacy, as its concern an increase in the understanding and the uses of reading and writing by the learners, aiming to form citizens who were readers and writers. According to the narratives of the literacy teachers focused on in this study, they used several strategies that made students develop cooperative attitudes, solidarity, concentration, care and interest. This happened because they realised and believed that such values were basic requirements to raise in the students’ willingness to learn; as well, they favoured the sense of responsibility, which was very important to them all. Such conceptions actually supported the stages of successful beginning literacy that marked the work of each of one these teachers.

That the teachers were aware of the difference between teaching reading and writing is an important aspect. They knew, for example, that the organisation of sequential teaching with well- defined stages was not enough to guarantee its success. They understood that success in begin- ning literacy depended on the type of learning that happened. For that reason, they worried about knowing how the students were learning, observing and interacting with them so that they could achieve explanations for the difficulties and incomprehension of the beginning literacy process. Because they considered that the act of learning is individual, these teachers always adopted heterogeneous teaching practices. The analysis of their representations on reading and writing indicates that the educators attempted to articulate the teaching method with the learning strategies manifested by the students, once they recognised the capacity of the learner to think about facts and things.12

So, the purpose of the reading and writing practices adopted was to lead students to a better appropriation of reading and writing skills, so that they could use them in their routine as tools for better living and reflection. Although each one of the literacy teachers has developed her very own teaching practices, they always worked while respecting the students’ particularities and their hypotheses for reading and writing. Mrs Eugênia, for example, organised 120 groups of words with specific characteristics for the practice of dictation. Mrs Maria da Conceição accomplished the study of the meaning of words, introducing them in several different contexts. Mrs. Oracy systematised the primer book starting from students’ realities and interests. Mrs Rosa began to teach the students with songs most listened to at that time. The respect they had for the students’ difficulties made the teachers accomplish more incisive pedagogical interventions to guide students to more complex levels of learning and reflection. A clear example of this kind of intervention is orthographic training, valued by them all, whose exercises and orientations were privileged in their ways of teaching and developing writing skills.

Conscious of the need to introduce school habits in the students’ lives, all the teachers devel- oped teaching practices that could provide their pupils with the acquisition of the two main habits: reading and writing. In this respect, they used curious and interesting strategies from different sources for the training of exercises in reading and writing as well as for the production of other texts. All the teachers developed activities with different characteristics, such as copy of texts of children’s literature, artistic production, more extensive dictation and free writing for the diver- sification of the work with simple and complex letters. These situations, besides preparing the children for exercise in reading and writing practice, also promoted the pleasure of accomplishing these skills, through being entertaining.

11 Magda Becker Soares, Letramento: Um Tema em Três Gêneros [Literacy: One Theme in Three Genres], 2nd ed. (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2002).

12 Cagliari, Luiz Carlos. Alfabetizando sem o Bá-Bé-Bi-Bó-Bu [Alphabetizing Without he Bá-Bé-Bi-Bó- Bu] (São Paulo: Scipione, 1999).

Paedagogica Historica 187

The initial practices of the school year were marked by teaching situations that already indicated to the students the teacher’s style and the way she tried to be organised. It was observed that some educators adopted the practice of introducing the students to the school with visits to its rooms. In this tour they explained several things to them: the daily characteristics and routine, the advantages that the school provided for their lives, the expected patterns of behaviour, the names of each school room and their linguistic meanings, and who the employees were and their respective functions. Then, the teachers aimed to explain to the students, from the first classes, that there was a commitment there to the development of attitudes and habits that would make them learn to read and write. The objective of these strategies was to have the students form a conception about the school, about the classroom activities and about the necessary behaviours in the school environment.

This concern with initial practices for the school year appeared in all the narratives, showing that the teachers tried to clearly define to the students the work that would be developed with them, as well as the rules that would control the relationship among them all, between the students and the teacher, and between each student and other classmates. This type of practice seems, in fact, to be one of the keys to school success, according to previous studies that indicated how much the knowledge and/or the decoding of interaction rules in the classroom add to the teaching process that guide students to school success.13

Regarding the basic abilities for the teaching of reading and writing, we verified that the teachers adopted specific practices, indispensable for pedagogical work in the beginning literacy area. They emphasised the importance of the organisation of rituals, involving, for example, the development of activities of motivating coordination, visual and auditory discrimination and oral language for the mental organisation of ideas. They created preparatory periods continually in which they would introduce a new concept or a language problem, exploring artistic production, orthographic training, copy, dictation and text interpretation. They defended the idea that the success of beginning literacy also depended on these practices, but that they should not be accom- plished exhaustively.

Thus, they understood, although intuitively, that the process of beginning literacy has a distinctiveness that cannot be lost. Instead, it has to be maintained and increased by the literacy process,14 which was also developed by the teachers, even though they did not have complete influence on the respective concepts. In an attempt to work on the teaching of reading and writing, the teachers developed them with other skills, such as visual and auditory attention, oral language and concentration capacity, which were seen as indispensable supports for the initial learning of reading and writing skills. They also attempted to arouse curiosity and an interest in books and in communication, revealing a teaching conception that was beyond the sense of initial literacy, because they also had objectives related to the importance of reading and writing and their social function.

Their use of primer books, following different methods, did not prevent the teachers from working in that perspective, once the use of this resource was done creatively. So that children could learn at any cost, they made the classroom an entertaining and pleasant space, neutralising the use of the primer book, which could be repetitive and non-motivating. It is clear, then, that these teachers’ great ability in the teaching of reading and writing consisted in adopting hetero- geneous practices and considering the students’ capacities, manifested in any aspect. In their classrooms no experience was wasted.

13 B.O. Bueno and T.B. Garcia, “School Success: The Rules of Interaction in the Classroom” (in Portuguese; English summary), Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos 77, no. 186 (1996): 263–81.

14 Magda Becker Soares, “Literacy and Alphabetisation: The Many Faces” (in Portuguese; English summary), Revista Brasileira de Educação no. 25 (2004): 5–17.

188 M.I. Monteiro and B.O. Bueno

The individualised teaching also characterised the literacy procedures of the four teachers, who kept to them for their entire career. They all claimed that they organised teaching activities in agreement with the conditions of the students’ learning. When they realised that some were not able to follow the classes, they changed the procedure to promote these students’ inclusion. These reports recalled Pam’s strategies, the American teacher described in the text “Power and caring” by Noblit,15 also a successful teacher, whose success in working with classes of “hard students” depended on pedagogical work guided by ethical principles. These principles meant a special way of taking care of the students and organising the teaching activities in the classroom. Pam under- stood caring as a relationship of affection that led her to an attitude of respect, interest and commitment in relation to others. When something was wrong, when a student was outside the group, she changed her teaching strategies to include him/her. She helped them as she could and showed solidarity with their troubled moments.

Similarly, the educators in the present study described their teaching practices, once they were also guided by the principle of democratising the activities in the classroom, attempting to guar- antee in each one the participation of all the children. Thus, they created their own method of work, but they had something in common: the four teachers used heterogeneous practices in their teaching, using a mix of methods considered traditional and more renovating or modern ones. Besides dictation and copy, for example, there were records, poetry, performing, music, creation, dialogue between students and with the teacher, according to each case, without neglecting the constant correction of the activities. According to the teachers, the mixing of practices and attitudes reinforced the students’ development in several directions, stimulating a more creative and autonomous way of thinking.

The reports allowed it to be noted that time is a determining factor for the development of writing, because this ability does not originally come from an immediate correction or from prescriptions and impositions. The richest elements for the improvement of language, as they said, are internal and not external. Children have to develop their ideas and incorporate them to be able to transmit them in richer ways; this happens, mainly, through the organisation of their inner world. This process was seen by these literacy teachers as indispensable in forming, from school onwards, the great writer and the great reader.

The aim of stimulating in the students the practice of creating, imagining, thinking, actively participating in the classes and relating to other colleagues, diversifying the complexity and the nature of the exercises was, certainly, one of the key factors in the formation of reading habits and in the development of writing competence,16 just as the teachers explained they developed this in their students. For them, it was more than reading and writing, merely decoding and matching language phonemes to graphemes, as beginning literacy was once understood and for a long time. Curiosity, satisfaction, happiness, willingness to learn and to know are tools which are also important to school success in early schooling, and these feelings were encouraged to help the children approach the world of reading and writing.

Success in beginning literacy also depended on the development of oral language, the study of word meanings, new words, the vocabulary and the formation of the students’ capacity so that they could participate in social life outside school, which are implicated in the learning of several languages and their respective domains. The teachers trusted that greater confidence in each stage of beginning literacy increased the children’s chances of acquiring the necessary communicative

15 George Noblit, “Power and caring,” American Educational Research Journal 30 (1993): 32–8. 16 Maria José Milharezi Abud, O Ensino da Leitura e da Escrita na Fase Inicial da Escolarização [The

Teaching of Reading and Writing in the Beginning of Schooling] (São Paulo: Editora Pedagógica e Universitária, 1987).

Paedagogica Historica 189

competences for their social lives.17 For this reason, they were demanding and strictly took care of this aspect.

Their evaluation practices were shown as a decisive resource for the organisation of reading and writing practices and for the pedagogical interventions that focused on students’ school success. To allow for individualised teaching, the teachers diversified the source and the kinds of evaluation they used, so that they could assist more advanced learners and those who showed difficulties. Constant inspection of students’ performance through daily supervision of their note- books during classes also helped to guarantee their school success. The evaluation consisted of investigating what they had done, how they had accomplished it and why they reached a certain result. Classificatory evaluation was not part of the work of those teachers. Their evaluation practices only had the purpose of better planning their classes and enabling them to decide on the use of individual and group strategies at the appropriate times. Thus, it can be stated that the liter- acy teachers studied organised their practices, aiming at “a useful dialogue and a deliberately informed evaluation”, in accordance with Hadji.18

In spite of having already mentioned this, it is important to highlight again the motivational practices often used by the teachers as an intrinsic part of the work style of each one and as an indispensable part of the development of students’ reading and writing skills. These kinds of prac- tices had the purpose of making the children understand the importance of reading and writing for their own lives and those of other people. These practices, generally of a ludic character, successfully guaranteed the involvement and the understanding of the multiplicity of relation- ships directly or indirectly related to the teaching of reading and writing. The diversification of exercises from different sources and of differing complexity was also undertaken along with the motivating practices, contributing to the achievement of the educational objectives proposed.

So it is concluded that “there is not only one right way of learning”. The teachers showed that they always had differentiated pedagogical attitudes when they exercised their educational occu- pation. Negotiation with the students – for pertinent decision-making on the activities and rules of the school’s routine, the use of not very common didactic resources, the adaptive capacity for the different forms of teaching, the perspicacity to understand and decode the students’ difficul- ties, as well as the capacity to diversify the reading and writing practices – supported these teachers’ pedagogical autonomy, mainly in the beginning literacy area, once they worked at this level of schooling – which they did for most of their professional lives – for their own interest and motivation.

The development of the professional domain described in this research emphasises the dynamic aspect of the profession, showing the development trajectories throughout their lives, through experiences that resulted in the transformation of each successful literacy teacher.

Final remarks

The results of this work, focusing on the knowledge and practices of successful literacy teachers, allow us to consider important elements in teachers’ education, especially that of beginning literacy teachers, because the content of the interviews reveals several attitudes and successful pedagogical interventions that can be taken in other educational settings.

17 Del Hymes, “Comunicative Competence,” in Sociolinguistics: An International Handbook of the Science of Language and Society, ed. U. Ammon, N. Dittmar, and K. J. Mattheir (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1987), 219–29.

18 Charles Hadji, A Avaliação, Regras do Jogo. Das Intenções aos Instrumentos [The Evaluation, the Rules of the Game. From the Intentions to the Instruments] (Porto: Porto Editora, 1994).

190 M.I. Monteiro and B.O. Bueno

In the development of these educators, an ability was noted to think perceptively about pedagogical situations related not only to beginning literacy, even if they did manifest from the start of their careers an interest in teaching at the first grade. The perception that the characteris- tics of childhood and society change, at each step, made them investigate, for example, the emer- gence of new toys, games and relationships that suddenly started to define the students’ behaviour. It can still be stated that the practice of teaching only in the first grades, over a long period, was not what actually allowed them to accomplish successful literacy practices.

In fact, it was diversified action in the profession (since they also exercised several practices besides teaching) that contributed to a better understanding of the several aspects of students’ education as readers and writers, as well as to acquiring a wide view of this process. Experience in teaching the four grades of primary school allowed them to identify the children’s most specific needs and the prerequisites of each level. Professional knowledge and the ability to think about education provided for better development of content, assuring the students’ school success in the other grades too, because success in beginning literacy prepared them to continue their study without further problems.

The professional life histories analysed indicate that success in teaching depended not only on an exclusive dedication to the same function, over an extensive period, or on the domain and the practice of a specific method of beginning literacy, or the use of the primer book. The begin- ning literacy experience in the first and subsequent grades allowed the teachers to perceive a complete process of teaching reading and writing in the primary school, just as the contact with new situations helped them in their beginning literacy practice during the whole time they were teachers.

Their teaching conceptions and practices, mainly those related to beginning literacy, were modified at several points of the teachers’ professional life, whenever they felt more experienced and confident in relation to the beginning literacy task. Their contact with personal and didactic events, and their life with students, parents, colleagues and educational authorities provided changes in their perception, resulting in new pedagogical challenges and analytic reflections, leading them to better professional performance. Such changes were, also, subsidised by reading about pedagogical experiences as well as by theoretical studies in the educational area.

The history of school and professional life reported by the educators studied reveals that the educational changes, which originated mainly in the 1971 Brazilian Law of Education, did not reach all the teachers in the same way. As educational policies established changes in teaching, the teachers (re)built their own pedagogical practices, making different uses of them.19 They created, for example, mechanisms to bypass the rigidity of the new rules, not inserting them in their classroom context. This is an attitude that sounds like an insult to the power of the State that, “as keeper of the monopoly of the legitimate symbolic violence”,20 imposes interests on the teachers so that these teachers make their educational practices possible. The feeling of safety in the profession and experience in teaching allowed the teachers to be selective and to take advan- tage of the most interesting aspects of the law that, according to them, would contribute to the organisation of their teaching practices towards students’ success.

Based on this evidence, we argue that the success of pedagogical work, particularly during the early years of schooling, lies in the ethics of the teaching work with a double implication: first, it requires the teachers’ dedication to their pupils, developing attentive practices without discrim- ination and, second, respect for the teachers’ work, so that they can keep their autonomy and inventiveness. These aspects indicate the need for reflection on teaching work and review of

19 Soares, Letramento. 20 Bourdieu, La Misère du Monde.

Paedagogica Historica 191

current teacher education policies, particularly the policies targeted at teachers working with literacy practices. This research offers a contribution to a rethinking of the policies and practices of effective literacy in the present day, aiming to successfully favour educational work and to develop other investigations on the topic, to deepen the subjects that this study has brought to light.

Notes on contributors

Maria Iolanda Monteiro, Assistant Doctor of the Paulista University (UNIP), Brazil, works in the field of teacher education. She received her PhD from the School of Education, University of São Paulo. Her Master’s and Doctor’s degree were in the area of literacy, focusing on successful practices. Her writings and articles are related to subjects involving literacy practices, evaluation and teachers’ initial and continuing education. Address: Avenida Professor Augusto Cézar, 1564. Cep 14801-240 – Araraquara-SP, Brasil.

Belmira Oliveira Bueno is Professor of Education at the University of São Paulo (USP). She has been visiting scholar at the School of Education, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Her research and publications concerns teaching, memory and gender connected to school reforms, and initial and in- service teacher education. She was President of the Research Committee of the School of Education, USP, and the editor of Educação e Pesquisa/Education and Research (http://www.scielo.br). Recently she has worked as the editor of the Latin American section for The International Handbook of Urban Education (Springer, 2008).