Deaf literature and socio-historical trajectories in the development of two deaf teachers

Abstract

The article discusses the development of readers in deaf communities, focusing on social practices of literary literacy in which Libras occupies a central role. We sought, through interviews with two deaf teachers of different generations, to reconstruct their trajectories, taking into account, on the one hand, the socio-historical paths in which they engaged during their reading education and, on the other hand, the understanding of reading constitution as a social, cultural and identity phenomenon. We establish an articulation between deaf literature and the social and school education of the deaf, reflecting on the processes that enabled them to build a reading repertoire and on the interfaces of this context with the policies that reaffirmed the bilingualism of the deaf and the right to use Libras. The experiences of socialization and schooling with literature and the Portuguese language tell about the trajectories of the deaf community and often prove to be bumpy, especially by the presence of clinical-therapeutic processes of insertion in the hearing community. However, the reported experiences also indicated a favorable engagement in social practices of literary literacy, either as readers who evaluate in a contextualized way certain productions or as authors who experience literary performances that are enhanced by social networks that circulate representative productions of the deaf community, which includes the systematic use of Libras.