Literacy practices in a youth and adult education

Abstract

This article discusses literacy education practices in events with newspapers and magazines, in which participated 27 reading students and a teacher in a Youth and Adult Education class in a municipal public school of Florianópolis in 2007. The theoretical perspective adopted for the data analysis is that of the New Literacy Studies (Street 2003; Barton 1994; Gee 2004, 2005;  Dionísio 2007a, 2007b) with an emphasis on the models of autonomous and ideological literacy proposed by Street (2003). The data presented demonstrate the existence of reading and writing practices in a Youth and Adult Education (EJA) which, at certain times, come close to the autonomous literacy education model, and at others, the ideological model. The data also reveal that linking educational practices to social practices allows understanding the plurality of the literacy practices, generating meanings helpful to students in relation to the methodology of teaching used and the reading and writing in use.