Del déficit al contacto. Perspectivas sociolingüísticas sobre las literacidades en las aulas

Abstract

This reflection article recovers the theoretical-methodological decisions taken in an ethnographic study of reading and writing practices in a secondary school for adults, with the aim of generating alternative approaches to the “deficit perspective”. Based on the contributions of the New Literacy Studies and the sociolinguistics of writing, two central approaches are developed: the first is to think of the classroom as a contact zone, in which subjects with different literacy trajectories and positions regarding the school assessment regime converge; this allows us to understand with greater precision the mismatches that arise in relation to school tasks and to capture the alternative resolutions that students produce, overcoming a standard/deviation view. The second shift consists of analyzing the students’ productions, not only as finished texts, but in terms of the use of their communicative resources, highlighting their capacity for agency in mobilizing these resources based on their own criteria of adequacy. Finally, the possible contributions of this approach to the design of transformative pedagogical proposals are considered, which conceive classrooms as rehearsal spaces in which students can explore new possible voices.