Entre letramentos e identidades: narrativas docentes e discentes na desconstrução da identidade feminina no espaço escolar

Abstract

The overarching aim of this dissertation is to describe and analyze the construction of gender identities through discursive representations produced by female teachers in practices of speaking, reading, and writing, considering their participation in formative events and observable literacy situations within the school context. The study is grounded in the interpretivist paradigm and adopts a qualitative approach, with Halliday‟s (1994) notion of the identification meaning of discourse serving as the central analytical category. The theoretical framework on female identity, literacys, discourse, and gender draws primarily on the works of Adichie (2015, 2017, 2019), Beauvoir (2016), Butler (2023, 2024), Davis (2017), hooks (2017, 2020, 2022), Kleiman (1995, 2005, 2007), Magalhães (2000, 2005, 2006), Ramalho and Resende (2011), and Resende and Ramalho (2022), among others. Additional contributions from Chouliaraki and Fairclough (1999), Fairclough (1992a, 1992b, 2016), Foucault (1985, 1996, 2008, 2010, 2011, 2014), and Halliday (1994) were also incorporated. The study involved two Portuguese language teachers working with a fifth-grade class in a municipal school located in the Midwest region of Goiás, Brazil. Data generation and analysis were conducted through discourse analysis, employing a range of methodological instruments and procedures, including two teacher questionnaires, classroom observations (from May to April), four literacy workshops, four sessions of a literacy-oriented pedagogical project, as well as transcriptions and analyses of activities, interactions, and entries in the teachers‟ reflective journals. The findings indicate that teaching identities are self-represented within a continuous process of re-signification, despite the profession being regulated and standardized by discursive orders that seek to frame and normalize social identities. Within this context, literacy practices with an identity focus emerge as a means of introducing discussions on social gender into the school environment. The engagement with texts, oral activities, readings, and written productions, mobilized as artifacts of identity learning, constitutes a productive pathway for fostering shifts and ruptures in crystallized understandings of gender identities.