Project Ra´zes: means of access to the community literacy in a quilombola context

Abstract

This article aims to present the results of the Projeto Raízes: letramentos, educação e cultura [Project Raízes: literacy, education and culture], carried out with students from Aleixo Pereira Braga school, an educational institution located in Quilombo Mesquita, a rural black community from Goiás, Brazil. This project aimed at including community literacies in the school context, considering specific social subjects from the students’ community. The project comprised literacy workshops through which stu-dents could participate speaking, reading, writing and working together with knowledges from the surrounding culture. The expe-rience indicated that Project Raízes was a good opportunity to students access the quilombola culture and the rural black community principles. The results showed that, based on a critical, socialcultural and sociolinguistic applied perspective, interchanging com-munity subjects and school programmes is feasible, enabling the development of an educational practice more democratic and in-clusive, regarding its social aspects. Furthermore, results indicate that literacy projects, when applied based on an interdisciplinary perspective, are a great means of access to new literacy and language practices in the community environment.