Práticas de letramentos acadêmicos incentivadas por atividades pedagógicas em ambientes virtuais de aprendizagem

Abstract

Access to public higher education has become popular and today, being part of the student body of a university is no longer a privilege of those individuals belonging to the groups most economically favored. Juchum (2016) highlights the recent preoccupation of higher education institutions with regard to academic literacy, especially by professionals who are dedicated to language studies, since students have difficulties with reading and writing, often attributed to this new student profile. To access university, public policies ensure equality of conditions for increasingly diverse social groups, but there is still a lack of more planning and institutional projects aimed at the permanence of these students. The objective of this study is to develop, implement and evaluate a pedagogical proposal based on the conception of literacy as a social practice in order to investigate the potentialities of virtual environments in the appropriation of academic literacy practices in the process of construction of an online collaborative community by and with students entering higher education. The general concepts and literature review begin with the conception of literacies in the perspectives of Kleiman (1995), Soares (2006), Britto (2007) and Zavala (2009), anchored in The New Literacy Studies (BUNZEN, 2014; STREET, 2014, ZAVALA, 2009), especially those who dedicate themselves to academic literacy in a particular way (ZAVALA, 2009, LEA, STREET, 1998, LILLIS, 1999, FIAD, 2011, 2013 and JUCHUM, 2016). In order to support the study of the possibilities of literacy in Virtual Learning Environments, I use studies by Braga (2007), Gonçalves (2011), Heemann and Leffa (2013) Schlatter et al (2009), Almeida (2003), Acosta and Dornelles 2015), Bulla (2007, 2014), Vetromille-Castro (2007). This work consists of a qualitative action research (TRIPP, 2005) in Applied Linguistics (MOITA LOPES, 2006) associated to virtual ethnography (HINE, 2000). The pedagogical intervention that generated data for the research consisted of a 30-hour course titled "#approved: Practices of Academic Writing and University Experiences", taught in the distance modality, by the Moodle platform in support of UNIPAMPA classroom courses offered to students in the 2018 undergraduate courses at the Dom Pedrito, RS campus. The results show that the course design developed, implemented and evaluated in this research is a possible alternative for the construction of a collaborative virtual learning community that allows the participation of students entering higher education in academic literacy practices. In the collaborative community “#aprovados” the students experienced these practices, initiating an important process of familiarization with the university context, being that: a) The community began by the recognition of belonging to the group, by common expectations and by solidarity in offering help; and was consolidated throughout the pedagogical intervention, by the student engagement in the activities; b) the course design favored actions that fostered collaborative practices of academic literacy; and, c) the students constituted their identities as academics, unveiled characteristics of academic writing, formed knowledge related to different forms of language and played a leading role as agents of academic literacy. This study resulted in the pedagogical product: “Manual for the elaboration and development of the course #aprovados: Practices of academic literacies and university experiences”.