The documentary and its interfaces in the school space: Didactic material and object of Portuguese language teaching-learning

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore the documentary genre and bring suggestions for its use as didactic material and learning object in teaching practices of the Portuguese language. These practices are primarily guided towards middle and High School grades in Brazilian schools, but they can be perfectly adapted to other grade levels and forms of teaching, as well as for continuing education of teachers. The study is based on the social-historic and discursive approach of the language and introduces and deepens its theoretic notions in ways intrinsically articulated and in the context of the classroom. The study’s theory is anchored mainly in the study of genres as social actions developed by New Rhetoric and in ideas elaborated by the School of Genebra, as it relates to the assumption of genres as teaching objects. Due to the typological diversity of this genre and limited space, the text focuses on the analysis of a single fi lm: “An inconvenient truth”. The expectation is not only to expand, but also deepen the pedagogic recommendations. The proposed idea is that the teacher has in the documentary an excellent auxiliary in the process of forming a more critic view on behalf of the students towards images (while they intend to represent the real world) and towards the construction of arguments and point of view.

Keywords: documentary, didactic material, teaching-learning object, “An inconvenient truth”.