A aprendizagem colaborativa no contexto da EJA: algumas reflexões à luz das teorias bakhtinianas

Abstract

This article presents the outcomes of a qualitative and interpretive oriented- case study, which was carried out with eight students from the Youth and Adult Education Program, offered by the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Goiás, located in the countryside. The main objective of this paper was to discuss the responsiveness of Youth and Adult Education students in an English for Specific Purpose course towards an activity based on the principles of Collaborative Learning, observing how the constitutive otherness is characterized in this context. The theoretical basis lies on general concepts of Collaborative Learning, such as the importance of social interactions for language learning in classroom contexts, as well as on basic concepts from the Bakhtin Circle, e.g. the utterance and the dialogical subject. The corpus was generated from an evaluative activity based on Collaborative Learning and an interview. After that, these data were transcribed and categorized based on the Bakhtinian concepts. The results pointed that the participants of this study did not respond collaboratively to the assigned activity. However, they emphasized, in the interview, the importance of group work to reach better results. Despite the controversies found in the students’ discourse in relation to their classroom actions, this study points out the importance of promoting a foreign language teaching-learning process that highlights decentralized and collaborative educational practices in the Youth and Adult Education Program.The study shows its relevance as it discusses the importance of Collaborative Learning in a context which is historically marked by the lack of autonomy and emancipation, as in the case of Youth and Adult Education.