WHEN TEACHERS ENCOUNTER LITERATURE: REFLECTIONS ON A UNIVERSITY EXTENSION JOURNEY

Abstract

This article aims to reflect on a university extension experience developed with Early Childhood Education and early elementary school teachers, taking literature as the central axis of a formative journey focused on literary reading, mediation, and listening. It is a descriptive-reflective experience report based on the extension project Literature, Childhood, and School: Formative Journeys with Teachers, carried out at a municipal public school in the state of Paraná, Brazil. Ten teachers participated in three face-to-face meetings, together with three undergraduate extension students involved in planning and conducting the activities. The reflection highlights the importance of considering the teacher as a reader before her role as mediator and problematizes the instrumentalization of literature when the meanings and purposes of reading are anticipated. It also discusses literary reading as a space for encounter with and listening to childhoods, and university extension as a possibility for shared formation between university and school. The journey also revealed the tension between the time required for literary experience and the urgencies of everyday school life. Given the brief duration of the initiative, no effects on teaching practices are claimed; rather, questions that remain open for other formative journeys are acknowledged.