Dr. Maria Lucia Castanheira, professor of education at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brazil will give the free public lecture “Multiple Layers of Context in Everyday Literacy Practices — Insights from a Cross-Generational Study in Brazil” on Tuesday, February 23 from 12 noon to 1 pm in Education Building 2209 on the UC Santa Barbara campus. Dr. Castanheira is an alumna of UC Santa Barbara's Department of Education, earning her Ph.D. in 2000.
In this session Castanheira will explore the ways in which the concept of ‘context’ has been applied in the literacy field and show how multiple levels of context play out in people’s everyday lives, literacy practices, and in a research process, and in doing so link the local and the global. She will point out different ways in which the notion of context can be explored in the study of literacy as social practice and will discuss implications of these differences. As a basis for this discussion, she will explore data from case studies carried out from an ethnographic perspective at different points in time with working families from research in Brazil that examines the meanings of literacy among members of working class families that live in Trombetas, a neighborhood in the city of Ibirité, a city of approximately 140.000 inhabitants that is part of the commuter belt of Belo Horizonte, a city that has around 2.5 million inhabitants. The first case study was developed in the late 1980s and the second is still in progress.