What do you learn when you learn literature? Students' representations of literature learning

Abstract

This article presents the results of master's research that sought to identify and analyze representations of reading and literature learning among elementary and high school students, as well as to compare them. Conducted with 8th grade elementary school students and 2nd grade high school students from a private school in the city of São Paulo, the research gathered data on beliefs, opinions, and situations experienced by students in their literary education within the school institution. The analysis of the data shows that the literature curriculum interferes with students' representations of learning, which often reproduce the representations of literature transmitted by the school and by subjects from the socioeconomic context in which they live. In addition, it was also possible to verify that the dominant representations of reading and literature learning are strongly related to vocabulary expansion, good performance in writing, and better understanding of other school subjects. The data collected are analyzed based on the contributions of Moscovici (2003) and Jovchelovitch (2008) on social representations and Meirieu (1998) on learning.