Intra-ações e emaranhamentos pós-humanistas em aulas de língua inglesa em um Instituto Federal de Ensino

Abstract

The main aim of this dissertation is to discuss an experience of language education in English with a posthumanist engagement. As specific objectives, I intend: to discuss the intra-actions and entanglements (Barad, 2007) between human and non-human entities that emerged from the context of the study; to establish new understandings of what language, curriculum, and assessment are; to develop new ways of doing language education from a posthumanist praxiology. The study was carried out with a group of 16 students who attended an English course in which I was the teacher. The classes took place at a federal institute for secondary, technical, and higher education in the city of Urutaí, Goiás, between August and November 2022. The study follows a postqualitative perspective (Kerasovitis, 2020; MacLure, 2013; St. Pierre, 1997, 2014a, 2014b, 2017, 2020), drawing on the emergence of the following apparatuses for the generation of the study material: a) registration forms of the students participating in the course; b) audio and video recordings of the 21 lessons of the course; c) audio recordings of conversations with the students at the end of the course; d) teacher’s diary; and e) various activities and records resulting from intra-actions throughout the course. The study material is first related to the concepts of the Anthropocene (Amorim, 2021; Shaw, 2018) and the Anthropo-scene (Torres, 2017), through which the contemporary global dystopian context is discussed, focusing on events related to the covid-19 pandemic and the Brazilian social context more broadly. From this scenario, I elaborate on the need to think about new ways of living (in) the world, supported by the concept of the Chthulocene (Haraway, 2016), which advocates the creation of fairer narratives for relations between human and nonhuman beings. To promote this world in language education with a posthumanist engagement, I propose a sociomaterial understanding of language (Pennycook, 2018b; Canagarajah, 2018a), which connects to the ideas of translanguage (Canagarajah, 2013; Veronelli, 2019) and polysemiosis (Canagarajah, 2018a; Toohey et al., 2015) to highlight the fluidity of linguistic repertoires and the breadth of semiotic elements that intra-act in meaning-making. Next, the curriculum is discussed in rhizomatic (Deleuze; Guattari, 2005) and tentacular (Haraway, 2016) terms, highlighting the unpredictable nature of how it develops, encompassing the intra-actions between the beings involved. Finally, assessment is addressed as a tension-free moment in which students can creatively produce language from semiotic resources of their linguistic repertoires, receiving feedback focused on their potentialities rather than on structural mistakes in the target language. Through this discussion, I intend to generate reflections for problematizing and deconstructing the vast humanist history of education so that we can reconfigure how we perceive the human figure and the materialities involved in language education contexts, while also considering the ethical implications of this change for all those involved.