ABSTRACT
This chapter is built up under two outlying interrogations: (1.) “What might critical literacies be like in Paulo Freire’s land?”, seeing him as a founding father of critical education in the world; (2.) “Have we been designing critical literacies made in Brazil?” These questions are responded along a narrative of the Brazilian state of the art of the Handbook theme. In its first overview, the focus lights over the 500 years of Brazil’s geographical and sociopolitical contexts while struggling for its identity and a democracy de facto in South and Latin America, as well as in South–South relations. The second overview explains the Brazilian educational system, thus highlighting the critical genealogical perspective of its literacies and critical literacies development. Here, the authors discuss literacies founding bases and practices described into four main literacy instruction models while seeing literacies/critical literacies movements in three different social–political generations.
To corroborate its last generation of critical proposals, a nationwide project (Projeto Nacional de Letramentos: Linguagem, Cultura, Educação e Tecnologia) is depicted. It has been carried out since 2009 within a collaborative network of more-than-30-participant universities, embedded of a pioneering nature in addressing critical perspectives to language/foreign language education as well as digital literacies in the classroom. From their broad experience with this project, along with Freire’s questionings on social and educational inequalities, as Brazilian academics, the authors discuss the implications for their social responsibility in such a project of society.
