Letramento acadêmico e suas implicações teóricas e metodológicas na pesquisa em educação e no ensino superior

Abstract

The study discusses university education, understood as a process of the subjects’ awareness through education. It analyzes the production of two perspectives that, although centered on the same object (reading, writing, and education in higher education), follow distinct paths. The first, of an earlier nature, is synthesized in the works of Britto (2003a, 2003b, 2005, 2007, 2009) and Britto et al. (2008); the second derives from the studies of Lea and Street (1998), whose conception has achieved wide resonance in the Brazilian academic context, especially since the early 2000s. The objective is to understand how studies on academic literacy have addressed the issue of university education; how they differ from earlier studies that did not adopt literacy as a theoretical perspective; and to discuss the effects these studies have produced in Brazilian educational research, particularly regarding reading, writing, and formation within the university. The research is not tied to a rigid theoretical framework; however, it conceives the subject as an active participant in the processes of production, circulation, and appropriation of knowledge in a society marked by inequalities, as argued — with due caution in approximation — by Heller (2016), Freire (2019), Adorno (2024), and Britto (2015). The epistemological method adopted is the evidential paradigm, formulated by Carlo Ginzburg (1989; 2007), seeking to confront different theoretical perspectives. The analysis indicates that the field of academic literacy has progressively colonized studies on reading, writing, and education in higher education. Although presented as an innovative approach, it tends to reaffirm outdated conceptions, with discussions centered on didactic practices and pragmatic orientations, often grounded in non-critical pedagogies such as the “learning to learn” and “competence” theories. Academic literacy thus emerges in this context driven by a certain fascination with the supposedly new and by a rejection of traditional education — a recurrent trait in the productions within the Humanities.