Abstract:

We believe that acts concerned with literacy and family, which give support to the contextualized teaching, directing people involved to the community mobilization, are a path for the current demands of teaching. Therefore, for the possibilities of students and their families feeling authors, agents and protagonists of their own deed, the School Journal has become an important tool for teaching and learning language in many countries, since the experience of Freinet (1974) initiated in 1924. Given this favorable context and relating it to the situation of new technologies and literacies of contemporaneity, we see that, in its electronic version, the newspaper can bring even more effects.

As most academic papers focus on the use of the School Journal on its printed version, there’s a lack of production related to the digital angle of this instrument; also, we did not find literature concerning to the study of this practice from theories of literacy with a focus on family. With this knowledge, this work was developed with the aim of bringing literacy practices of the context of alphabetization to the community, using the concepts of family literacy (CAIRNEY, 2005), literacy practice (KLEIMAN, 1995), agency (BAZERMAN, 2011) and digital literacy (LEU at AL, 2004). We noticed a strong link between the concepts due to ( i ) the newspaper being a practice, by itself, social, (ii ) the electronic newspaper being a strong tool for the dissemination of written production, (iii ) its copies having function and exert agency and influence in other subjects , ( iv ) the possibilities for collaborative work and establishment of roles in this practice.

Our proposal fits into the field of studies in Applied Linguistics (LA), in a qualitative-interpretative paradigm. With these notions in mind, we have also adopted the collaborative nature of research, due to the active participation of the teacher and researchers with participants to encourage individuals in the community to mobilize resources from different orders. This work is the result of data generated with twenty two students from the first and second years of primary education in a public school located at Natal – RN, and it ties to a research project conducted by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), funded by the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) and with support from the Centre for Education, entitled “The habitus of study: builder of a new reality in basic education in the metropolitan region of Natal." The bond allowed a collaborative work between the group, the authors and two teachers of elementary education in public schools, in a class of 1st year (2012) and 2nd year (2013) for construction of the online newspaper created. The findings we seek are to develop in students the competence of writing outside of school, which is beyond the reality of the majority of literacy teaching in context. Our porpoise was also to aware that the productions are worthy of being presented to the community, because the creation of these concepts makes the student more prepared to the challenges of society regarding their writing and develop the perspective of ascension through writing practice.