“A ray of sun resisting as night falls”: pedagogy of inquiry as democratic resistance in language education

Abstract

Drawing on assumptions from post-structuralism and queer literacies, especially the “pedagogy of inquiry” proposed by Nelson (1999), our aim, in this article, is to show how repertoires about different spheres of social life can be approached democratically in language education, allowing the mobilization of plural and contradictory meanings, as well as the articulation of democratic resistances in the classroom. To this end, we revisit repertoires and performances of gender and sexuality discussed in Hoelzle's master's dissertation (2016), reentextualizing the empirical material generated by the author and making a discussion in which we defend the pedagogy of inquiry, which is very well constructed by her, although this is not a praxiological construct of her study. The choice of the two topics for discussion, gender and sexuality, is providential in the Brazilian context, since both of them cross a considerable part of repertoires mobilized and measures taken by the current government to restrict the construction of critical meanings in educational contexts. In the six communicative events, the pedagogy of inquiry is always marked by conflict, arising from different historicities and socio-identity performances of the people involved in the communicative events. Thus, we conclude by arguing that, because language allows the production of multiple and alternative meanings about social life, we cannot fail to build, in the contexts of linguistic education, meanings that enable the construction of more democratic frames. This construction is our “taste of the sun” that resists in the mouth of the night.