Edited by Angela B. Kleiman
The meanings of Literacy: A New Perspective on the Social Practice of Writing brings together the work of nine Brazilian researchers on the subject of literacies. Their contributions explore the concept of literacies and its impact on the teaching of writing from a sociocultural paradigm. The work constitutes a milestone in Latin American literacy studies and remains relevant more than 25 years after its original publication. It covers a variety of debates that cross multiple disciplines, theoretical perspectives, and methodological approaches, including perspectives from sociolinguistics, critical discourse analysis, and ethnography.
The edited collection provides detailed explanations of the concepts of literacy and writing throughout the educational trajectory, aligning itself with "the path traced by Paulo Freire" (Kleiman, 1995, p. 8) and with international debates on a critical view of literacies by, for example, Brian Street and Shirley Brice Heath in the 1980s. The book is organized in three parts: the mode of participation of orality in literacy (with three chapters), the illiterate in literate societies (three chapters), and the verse and reverse of literacy (with two chapters). Written by well-known Brazilian researchers taking different theoretical perspectives, the chapters investigate a plurality of social practices and contexts (school, family, media) and include multiple voices, both of the schooled and the unschooled, bringing illuminating data for an unprejudiced view of the literacy practices of unschooled groups in parallel with a view of writing as a right of these communities. The historical importance of the book and the relevance of the studies on literacies and the accompanying pedagogical proposals make this collection an assuredly significant contribution to contemporary research.
