| Hello, *|NOME|* On May 3, IMDS hosted the seminar "Literacy Methods: how the science of reading can benefit educational practices and policies", given by Renan Sargiani, president of the Institute for Evidence-Based Education (Edube). Sargiani, who completed his postdoctoral studies in education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, created an educational solution called Novos Amigos (New Friends), which introduces inputs into classrooms at the end of preschool and the beginning of elementary school for the formation of foundational skills that are precursors to good literacy. The seminar continues the partnership between IMDS and the Edube Institute, focused on the enrichment of public debate and the practice of literacy in Brazil. One of the projects managed by the partnership involves the development of comprehensive and unprecedented instruments for the quality of literacy at the end of preschool and at the beginning of basic education, and contextual questionnaires that allow mapping the surroundings of this process, both at home and in the classroom. By joining efforts, we hope to be able to contribute so that poor reading no longer acts as a barrier to the formation of skills that sustain stronger engagements with school life and more productive transitions from school to the labor market, and that this has consequences for the use of opportunities for human development and social mobility. The basis of the arguments presented in Renan's seminar comes from the so-called Cognitive Science of Reading, developed from the 1960s onwards. One of the fundamental features of this field of knowledge is its multidisciplinary nature, with inputs from neuroscience, cognitive psychology and linguistics, and speech therapy. To focus on just a few inputs, neuroscience has made it possible to map regions of the brain that are activated in specific tasks that underpin the literacy process, such as pronunciation and articulation or access to meaning. Some experiments presented by the author, for example, show that different methods of literacy build connections in different areas of the brain – and, as a result, end up consigning different possibilities for new connections, which can be determinant for the speed and quality of literacy and cognitive reading. The complex picture described by Renan, according to him, is miles away when it comes to the public debate on the subject in Brazil. Here, the debate is configured, in a particularly intense way, as what has been called the "war of methods", in which phonic approaches (centered on learning the code) and global approaches (sometimes also called constructivist, and which would center the literacy process on the apprehension of meaning) are confronted. The "war of methods," as argued in the seminar, lands in the classroom as a set of decisions of what, when, and how to teach. An example of a decision is to teach whole syllables or to segment and synthesize graphemes and phonemes to students at the beginning of the literacy process. At the seminar, Renan brought evidence from authorial research that the second pedagogical practice has 50% to 100% higher productivity in child literacy. This enormous difference can have huge consequences, in particular, for the literacy of children from different socioeconomic groups, correcting inequalities created within the family – to use the expert's terms, by the "literate cultural capital" of its "hidden faculty members" of fathers, mothers and other close influences. See you at the next “Letter from IMDS”! Paulo Tafner CEO |
