Literacies of what? – conceptions, implications and repercussions on school education
specific literacy; school education; training
The term Literacy derives from the English word Literacy and was incorporated into the brazilian academic and educational debate from the mid-eighties onwards. Throughout this, the frontiers of the concept, previously linked to reading and writing, and now linked to school and school subjects, such as History Literacy, Mathematics Literacy, Chemistry Literacy, Cinematographic Literacy, Visual Literacy and Literary Literacy, expanded. In this ongoing research, the following problem is discussed: How has the concept of literacy expanded and spread in different areas of knowledge and what are the theoretical and methodological consequences both for understanding the concept of literacy and for school education? For data production, a set of academic texts published in journals that address the discussion of specified literacies, which are characterized by the qualification of the literacy concept by the addition of a specifier (adjective or adjective phrase), were surveyed. A pilot study developed with the purpose of testing the analysis categories, considering a set of ten texts, with different literacy specifiers, highlights the relationship between skill development at the expense of knowledge learning, use of the literacy concept as a prerequisite for training criticism of school subjects and the presence of an analogy between the traditional concept (learning the social uses of reading and writing) and the idea that permeates the specifier, as, for example, in the text on cinematographic literacy.