The Didactic in Initial Literacy: Between the Perception and Representation

Introduction

Literacy is a topic of global concern. Governments are worried about making all their citizens literate because they know that it is a condition for development. After all, it generates possibilities to reduce poverty; however, the results are not always as expected, sometimes because not everyone can attend school and other times because despite going to school, not everyone manages to become literate in the full sense of the word. It is to this second situation that allusion will be made in this chapter; hence the focus on didactics. The chapter aims to highlight the need to return to didactics, influenced by the beliefs and conceptions that both teachers and students have, and the reasons why the didactics of initial reading and writing move between teaching practices based on auditory and visual perception.

We will begin by exposing what is meant here by literacy,

According to UNESCO (2021), ‘literacy is understood today as a means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digitized, text-based, information-rich and rapidly changing world’ (2021). This organization states in the same document:

The call of the UNESCO is also consistent with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed by the United Nations (UN), since, if this problem is addressed, not only SDG 4, quality education, but also SDG 1, no poverty, and because it is two of the most important objectives worldwide, the states have established commitments translated into generating policies and concrete actions to quickly close this gap (ONU, 2022). On the other hand, according to Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC, in Spanish CEPAL), citing UNESCO – INNOVEMOS 2012 claim: ‘Literacy is a social process, which is related to the distribution of knowledge within society. For this reason, it can be understood as a right of individuals and a duty of societies’ (2014, p. 7) and adds that it is not possible to achieve effective democracy if a large part of the population has not become literate.

In the document cited above, it is also stated that the concept of literacy has been modified concerning the object because it is no longer considered only a process of handling basic skills, but rather a continuous process of development in reading, writing, and mathematics. There has also been a change in what for: there has been a move from a perspective strictly focused on what is productive, towards a perspective that relates it to work, social and personal development demands. Lastly, attention has been shifted from the subject to the context, seeking to ‘ensure the conditions for people to read and write. It is about developing written culture by promoting literate societies that give social value to these skills and are committed to lifelong learning’ (CEPAL 2014, pp. 7-8).

It is known that the school can produce functional illiterates when it does not train students as social users of reading and writing. The concepts of literacy - illiteracy have changed from the all-or-nothing classification: that is, there may be people who have some literacy, such as knowledge of letters and the ability to put together simple sentences, but are not fully literate, in both are not in a position to function with properly in society. This conception derives from the modifications that have been made to the concept of literacy, mentioned in the previous paragraph. These modifications demand more complex actions on the part of the school and the communities because they must promote the construction of literate and literacy environments that allow continuous learning and the development of people. This is stated in the UNESCO document – ​​INNOVEMOS 2012, cited in an ECLAC document (2014): if you seek to decode letters, less effort is required than if you seek to enable people for lifelong learning.