O poder de dar nomes às coisas: sobre reconhecimentos e aprendizagens em práticas e discursos

Abstract

The data for this paper stems from three year long ethnographic research on the routes through literacy practices lived, experienced and shared by a group of Portuguese migrant adult women upon their move from Portugal to Britain. One of the main findings in this research was a common path of relocation of uses of language and literacy experienced by the women in their processes of participation in the sometimes opaque social practices that constituted their daily lives in London. The ways in which they negotiated meanings and took decisions as they participated in practice clearly illustrates the informal learning and the situated cognition processes that these women experienced in their lives. In these routes through practices, these women used particular mechanisms that I have considered elsewhere as being simultaneously mental, social, discursive and linguistic (Keating, M.C., 2001, 2002). In participating in literacy and language practices, these women repeated ways of reading and writing, recognised them as “ways of doing”, reflected upon them as existing practices in their contexts and recombined them for their purposes. In these processes, they appropriated strategies in order to construct and reinvent their own identities in the migrant context.