THE RESEARCH ON LITERACY AND LITERACY OF YOUNG PEOPLE AND ADULTS: CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE DEEPENING AND UNDERSTANDING OF KNOWLEDGE
literacy ; functional literacy; youth and adult education (EJA).
This dissertation is about “research from research”, whose general objective was to understand the production of knowledge about literacy skills in Youth and Adult Education (EJA) in thesis and dissertations, in the Postgraduate Programs in Education at Federal Universities of the Northeast from Brazil, from 2010 to 2021. The investigation started from the following issue: what are the main theoretical-conceptual fundamentals and recurrent writers in Youth and Adult Education (EJA), presents in dissertations and theses in Postgraduate Programs in Education at Federal Universities of the Northeast ? This issue took on the following consequences: Are these productions present in all Postgraduate Programs in Education in the Northeast? In which Lines of Research? What are the contributions and relevance of these productions? What theoretical-conceptual foundations are used on literacy in these productions? To achieve the objective and ‘answer’ the questions, we used a qualitative approach focusing on bibliographical study (Lima; Mioto, 2007) and documental analysis (Ceillard, 2008). The Capes' catalog of theses and dissertations was our locus, which allowed, after several filterings, a corpora of 6 dissertations and 5 theses, all with qualitative approaches, which were analyzed considering the literacy categories from the perspective of functional literacy, underlining that the recurrence by Freire (1974) and Ferreiro (2007), who dialoged with Soares (1985, 1998, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2016, 2018, 2020), Kleiman (1995, 2016), among others, denoting a hybridity of conceptions; and literacy and functional literacy, focusing on researchers affiliated with New Literacy Studies, with Soares, M. (2016), occupying a prominent place. The study also showed that in Postgraduate Studies in Education in the Northeast, the number of productions about the two phenomena is still limited – which imposes the need for more study in this field of knowledge -; the education and language's line, in dissertations and theses, stood out - and others such as popular education, education, knowledge and culture - showing that it's a important theme, which demonstrates the possibility of expanding research in the future, to extend dialogue with the studied object.