Letramento multissemiótico e interdisciplinaridade no ensino médio: implicações para a produção de infográficos

Abstract

The popularization of digital technologies has made multisemiotic interaction commonplace for most Brazilian citizens, through the integration of multiple systems of meaning-making. Within the scope of recent studies on literacies, the New London Group (Cazden et al., 2021), composed of Fairclough, Kalantzis, Kress, and other scholars, as well as Rojo and Moura (2019) and Ribeiro (2016; 2021), highlight the impact of emerging media at the end of the twentieth century on the increasingly multisemiotic composition of texts – thus characterizing the concept of multiliteracies – and reflect on the persistent mismatch between the texts that circulate socially and those addressed in schools, particularly in Portuguese language classes. The infographic, for example, a genuinely multisemiotic text, frequently appears in Geography or Mathematics classes but is still underexplored in reading and writing practices in Portuguese language instruction. This study therefore aims to address the lack of research on texts from the perspective of the production itinerary, encompassing stages that range from the development of ideas to publication, as well as the need for academic investigation into the development of multisemiotic literacy through reading and text production practices from an interdisciplinary perspective in teaching and learning contexts. Such practices are understood as essential to students’ linguistic and critical education as they prepare for the world they will encounter after basic education, whether in social life, higher education, or professional environments. From this perspective, the present research seeks to analyze the processes of elicitation, treatment, and articulation of interdisciplinary knowledge in the production of infographics in Portuguese language classes. In addition, the specific objectives are: a) to analyze the strategies and semiosis mobilized by students in the collective construction of infographics through the use of digital tools and media, and b) to relate the multisemiotic representations elaborated and organized in infographic production to the intended meaning effects pursued by the students. To achieve these objectives, an action-research study was conducted through an interdisciplinary didactic itinerary on ethics and social responsibility, integrating the curricular components of History and Portuguese Language, with the participation of 90 first-year high school students from a State Professional Education School located in Maracanaú, Ceará, Brazil. Advancing the understanding of multiliteracies practices in school as an important mechanism for human, intellectual, and technical education, since students are language agents capable of intervening in the society in which they live, the analysis of the 18 infographics produced on the hero’s journey in fiction revealed, beyond their informative and expository function, the argumentative nature of the infographics. This was evidenced by the integration

of knowledge from different areas and by the intentional and persuasive use of verbal and non- verbal resources for meaning construction, within a real language practice that transfers

classroom learning to the world, developing these young learners as active designers of meaning.