Literacy and communicative (in)flexibility: interactional failure in Brazilian programs of diffusion of knowledge

Abstract

The present paper tries to show how the beliefs (or myths) related to literacy and to school practices on the one hand, and to scientific epistemologies on the other, contribute to theoretical and practical difficulties in the acquisition and improvement of communicative flexibility in discursive actions involving status hierarchies and positional identities. Combining ethnographic insight with a contextualist approach of dialogue as intersubjective construction, it builds on the notion of communicative flexibility as (a) an ability to redefine situations as a function of the interlocutor, and, above all, (b) a capacity to accept the coauthorship of the interlocutor in any new sociocultural order to be established or sustained by interactional activity. The data come from institutional programs in Northeast Brazil, implemented as of 1984 for the diffusion of technology and scientific knowledge. In addition to the routine interactions between the social actors involved in these programs, the corpus for analysis also consisted of the oral and written evaluations of the programs focused on. The choice of institutional programs as a context for the collection of data was due primarily to the emancipatory function officially attributed to these programs, as well as to the technological-scientific basis of the knowledge to be disseminated within them.