Community literacy. Engagement. Local knowledge. Scholar knowledge.
This qualitative research of critical and empowering approach is based on the principle that discussions about engagement, empowerment and transformation in the family, community and school spheres are necessary in the current conjuncture. The research environments are the neighborhood of Nova Descoberta - Natal - RN and the Municipal School Professor Ulisses de Góis and, the collaborators, were constituted of members of the school team, students of a first year class of Elementary School, their relatives and external agents from ten different establishments. About generation procedures, a community literacy program was carried out in 2017, during a school year, with the collaborators involved, carrying out reading, speaking and writing activities that enabled school-family-community engagement, registered in the online resource e-book. Thus, the general objective of the research was to discuss the impact of a community literacy program on the scaling down of speech, reading and writing practices in the school environment, and specifically to (i) characterize the community literacy program; (ii) identify strategies of actions, events and practices that favor the articulation between school-family-community; (iii) establish articulation between local knowledge and school knowledge. The study is theoretically based on literacy studies (STREET, 1984; KLEIMAN, 1995; OLIVEIRA; TINOCO; SANTOS, 2014), focusing on community literacy issues (HEATH, 1983). It also deals with concepts of local knowledge (LYOTARD, 1989), culture as symbolic systems (GEERTZ, 1973), culture of silence (FREIRE, 1976), silencing and voice (KEY, 1998), a learning community (WATKINS, 2005), deterritorialization (SANTOS, 1994), genres (BAZERMAN, 2011) and collective memories (CHAUÍ, 2000). From the discussions undertaken, network of activities, school-family-community engagement, deterritorialization of places of learning, and cultural artifacts and local knowledge were listed as analytical categories. The analyzes indicate that knowledge not traditionally available in the school space has been mobilized through language, focusing on the interests of the collaborators and the valorization of the local culture, which contributes to a critical understanding of the environment that surrounds them and to the creation of new relationships between teacher, researcher, student, family, and external community.