Socio-Critical Reading of Texts from Salta: Toward a Change in Reading Practices in School

Abstract

First, this paper offers comments on a series of workshops carried out by the members of Research Project 422/94 of the Research Council of the National University of Salta with teachers from other educational levels. In these workshops, the concepts of reading, text, and writing were reviewed, based on the idea that an expansion of the semantic scope of these concepts would amount to a conceptual change capable of modifying ways of reading at school.

In the final workshop, aimed at seeking “strategies for making use of the cultural production of the region”, it was surprising to see teachers repeating what they had always done: teaching their students poems by old poets such as Juan Carlos Dávalos or Clara Saravia Linares de Arias. In discussing with them the motivations behind their selection, we discovered an aversion to free verse, which the research team interpreted as a metonymy of resistance to change.

In a second stage, the paper analyzes two texts produced in Salta in the 1930s and the 1980s, respectively: “Tierra mía”, by the aforementioned writer, and “Romper el cascarón”, by Teresa Leonardi Herrán. The first text was taken from the teachers’ selection, and the second from the booklet prepared for them. In both cases, the analysis focuses on the entry of social discursivity, ideologies, and axiologies current at the time of production of each text, and seeks to show the high productivity of practicing this kind of contrast with students in the final grades of the primary level and at other levels of formal education.

Finally, the paper centers on an analysis of “Canción de la Ballena”, by Rosa Machado, in order to identify not only the inscription of the social and the ideological in the text, but also its ruptures. According to Régine Robin, the poetic text does not adhere to hegemonic discourse; it possesses an unconscious level, admits incoherence, and does not reproduce ideology but produces it. On this basis, the paper proposes a way of working with “Canción de la Ballena” and with its own way of making something new out of old garments, as a small contribution to the search for new ways of reading at school.