Leitura dialógica e multimodalidade na formação de leitores autistas: uma intervenção com contos infantis no ensino fundamental

Abstract

The current Brazilian educational landscape, in light of the goals of universalizing education proposed by major public policies in force, has required school institutions to adopt innovative and non-exclusionary educational practices. This demand calls on all those involved in the educational process to assume a posture of deconstruction, which entails the need for a theoretical–methodological reorientation and a constant search for new investigative horizons. Within this context, the principles of the inclusive school are evoked, whose essence lies in valuing and respecting diversity while ensuring quality education adapted to the individual needs of students, with a view to equal opportunities for all. In this scenario, it becomes essential to promote pedagogical situations that foster the genuine inclusion of autistic students so that, considering their singularities, teaching processes can be adapted and a viable cognitive path for their development and learning can be ensured. Based on this educational framework, the present research focused on developing a study grounded in the principles of Dialogic Discourse Analysis and centered on the reading of children’s short stories. The study was guided by the connection between Reading Procedures and concepts from Multimodality, aiming at an intervention designed to enhance reading comprehension in children with Autism Spectrum Disorder from the 3rd to the 5th grade of Elementary School. This intervention is relevant insofar as several studies—based on three theoretical foundations, namely the Theory of Central Coherence (Frith, 1989), the Executive Dysfunction Theory (Damasio & Maurer, 1978), and Theory of Mind (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985)—indicate that children with autism may require pedagogical guidance that supports them, in the realm of reading, in retrieving and integrating the meanings necessary for constructing textual sense, in establishing relationships between the content read and their prior knowledge, and in making textual inferences. To this end, we adopted the studies of the Bakhtin Circle as the central theoretical–methodological framework of our research, interweaving knowledge of reading Strategies and Capacities from the works of Solé (1998), active comprehension among autistic learners, encouraging them toward valuative and critical positioning and yielding significant gains in the process of constructing and integrating textual meanings. Furthermore, the dialogic interactions with autistic learners—marked by each individual’s uniqueness—enabled us to conceive of and value them as subjects who learn and who can be protagonists of their own learning process.