History of reading: professores leitores, book circulation policies and reverberations in teaching

Abstract

This paper examines the reflections of Roger Chartier's studies on the history of reading. If the story of reading is the story of its readers, investigating teachers and their ways of making a reading universe can lead us to a more elaborate understanding of how reading teachers build a reading environment in their daily pedagogical practices. This study aims to analyze the relationship between the cultural capital and the reading education of public school teachers in Teresina-PI, more specifically in the Municipal School Professor Valdemar Sandes. In this regard, fragments of the life history reported by the researched teachers were investigated, as well as their itineraries of reading education and their unfolding into the personal and professional lives of the subjects. Therefore, the methodology of oral history was used, making the construction of data from narrative interviews in which the question of reading was focused as a cultural practice of these teachers. As the conceptual elucidations were theoretically located, the fragments of these narratives were studied and a posteriori an analysis of the sayings of the informants was made. In the first moment, a discussion on reading and the construction of its legitimacy as a symbolic cultural practice was introduced, inferring about the policies of circulation of the book and, later, dialogue was held with the studies on teacher training, habitus and cultural capital of teachers through biographical narratives. These discussions are based on the contributions of cultural history (CHARTIER, 1999) and the theory of social structures, or praxeology, proposed by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, focusing mainly on the concepts of cultural capital (BOURDIEU, 1975; 1989; 1990; 1998; 1999; 2007). Thus, it is concluded that cultural capital is every resource or power that manifests itself in a social activity referring to a symbolic capital that in relation to teacher training and reading practices presents a plural itinerary. It was also verified that the subjects present similarities in their life and formation paths, since they are inserted in the less favored classes of society and these also present dissonant aspects characterized by their ways of interacting with culture.