Contextualized education in the school literacy: a look at Youth and Adult Education

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present contextualized education in school reading and writing practices
due to the cultural diversity in the classroom in the Brazilian semi-arid region. It is a qualitativedescriptive research and it was developed in a rural school in the municipality of Petrolina/PE. The
selected method was ethnographic and the following procedure techniques were used: participant
observation, logbook, and recording of classes and informal interviews with students and teachers.
The study was carried out in a fourth-phase class of Youth and Adult Education with a focus on four
participants: three students and the Portuguese language teacher of the class. The results show that
reading and writing skills cannot be reduced to decoding actions, since, as students are aware of
their culture and aim to become more active and autonomous in their society, the use of
contextualization by teachers improves not only reading and writing skills but school learning in
general because it uses the reality of students as a subsidy for teaching.