Colonial letters at school: analysis of textbook aimed at high school students

Abstract

The textbook as one of the main teaching instruments. Based on this premise, this paper aims to verify how the contents relating to the called “literature of the colonial age” are organized in the textbook intended for students and teachers in the 2nd year of high school, from the Language and Interaction collection. The theoretical and methodological assumptions involve colonial letters and the reading stages and Bloom's taxonomy. The corpus of analysis is composed of six texts and their activities found in the sections O início da literatura brasileira: literatura de informação e Barroco no Brasil: surge nosso primeiro grande poeta. The analysis procedures involved: i) categorization of texts and activities, ii) analysis of the corpus based on the steps for working with reading based on Cosson (2011) and iii) analysis of the levels of complexity required by the activities in light of the Bloom's taxonomy (1956), revised by Krathwohl (2002). The results showed that the activities do not include the Pre-reading and Post-reading stages, which are essential to anticipate the student's contact with the text to be worked on as well as establish relationships between what was worked on and the reality in which the subjects are inserted. Furthermore, the activities in the texts of the analyzes presented do not provide for the mobilization of the advanced level of complexity, based on the processes of evaluating and creating and, therefore, objectives for the construction of knowledge are not established.