Permanent Learner: Class 3 - Pro Dia Nascer Feliz

On our third class on 27th August, we saw the first part of the documentary “Pro dia nascer feliz”, which showed the lack of infrastructure of the most schools in the countryside. Starting from the transport, which is done by very old buses carrying more students than they should, the total lack of basic facilities like water, toilets and illumination and many other essential things vital to give the students a proper place to study, the education on these areas seems to be left behind by the Educational System. Besides that many students are not really interested in their education, because they do not see a purpose for that. On the other hand, most teachers are demotivated as they have no hopes about their or their student’s future.
On the second part, we watched the educational reality at Colégio Santa Cruz, in São Paulo, where most students were born rich, with all kinds of facilities available and with motivated teachers. It was shown that these students just have a slight idea of what the world outside their school’s gates is, but they also feel uneasy as they seem incapable of thinking of a solution, because they are just teenagers.

As a next step of the class, we divided ourselves in groups and used the jigsaw reading technique to analyze some relevant articles. Our group, in particular, discussed the text ‘Multiliteracies and Language - Orders of Discourse and Intertextuality’ by Norman Fairclough. In the text, the author presents the ‘designs of meaning’: the creative application of the language according to the needs of communication. He also mentions the marketization of the language, which is the language of some areas being influenced by the language of the market in order to achieve people in a more profitable way. According to the author, globalization is an economical, social, political and cultural process which leads to a global use of languages, changing the relationship between them in their cultural and linguistic aspect.

References
FAIRCLOUGH, Norman. Multiliteracies and language. Orders of discourse and intertextuality. In: COPE, B. e KALAZANTZIS, M. (Eds.) Multiliteracies. Literacy learning and the design of social futures. New York: Routledge, 2000.