Sailing Through Reading with the Hero João de Calais: Cordel Comics in the Classroom

Abstract

This paper is part of an ongoing doctoral research project and reports on a reading experience with the cordel comic book História do navegador João de Calais e de sua amada Constança, by Arievaldo Viana and Jô Oliveira, carried out with students from a multi-grade class in a public school in Paraíba, Brazil. Its main objective is to reflect on the teacher’s role as a mediator of literary reading in the classroom, discussing how the cordel comic book cordel genre can contribute to some redefinitions of reading practices within the school context. The theoretical framework of this research includes Jauss (1994), Munita (2024), Abreu (1999), Feijó (2006), Costa (2012), Vergueiro (2006), Wanderley (2020), among others. Using a qualitative approach, the study adopts participant observation, questionnaires, and a reading journal as procedures and instruments for data collection. Different reading modalities were also applied during the classroom experiment: silent reading, reading aloud, and comparative reading. The results point to students’ playful engagement with the work, as well as to a positive reception of the narrative presented in different media and formats, revealing the potential of the  cordel comic book  as a literary text to be mediated in the classroom.