A importância dos modelos nas atividades de escrita e a liberdade de criação / The importance of models in the development of writing abilities and creativity

AUTOR(ES)
DATA DE PUBLICAÇÃO

2009

RESUMO

Reading and writing are important tools that can be used by students to enhance their understanding about the world and the environment around them. The ability of writing requires prior knowledge of certain quality standards that must be properly evaluated and reproduced if one wishes to accomplish a good quality text. Thus, the best way to enhance a student´s writing ability might be through writing propositions that stimulate the paraphrases of good text models, aiming at helping their communications skills, until the autonomy in writing is fully developed. In this case, however, a few important points must be considered: can such text models affect the student´s creativity? Is it possible for a student to copy/comply to a model text and, yet, develop his/her own autonomy at the same time? To answer such questions, George Steiner, in his book Grammars of Creation, points that we are always copying, or repeating models, actions or ideas learned from other people. In a general sense, creation would be much closer to paraphrases than from what is understood as original. Bakhtin agrees with this idea, pointing that we can be echoes from other voices around us, repeating ideas that are not just ours, but belong to our social environment and influence our thoughts and actions. This is one of the major driving forces to the development of our knowledge, according to Vigotsy´s Social-cultural Theory. Thus, it is possible to draw a few ideas concerning the role(s) that must be played by the school and the textbooks in the process of developing the students as efficient and autonomous authors of written texts. It is necessary to teach students to find new meanings to the model texts, so they can go beyond copying and reproducing other people´s texts, and start creating upon such new ideas, until their writing develops into true authorship. The evaluation of writing propositions contained in school textbooks might be a good way to determine how it is possible to help students to develop this process. In this work, we evaluated the interplay among copy, reproduction, paraphrases and authorship during students development as independent writers. We considered the methodologies inherent to the writing propositions found in six different school textbooks all of them are widely used in schools across the country and have been approved by the Programa Nacional do Livro Didático. All textbooks contained appropriate exercises, in which the main objective was to force students to define new meanings to model texts, developing these new ideas into an original text. Our main concept is that human creation, although often dependent on previously conceived models, cannot be considered a simple act of repetition; there is genuine input from the author, which can be viewed as an enhancer in this process, as he/she adds upon pre-existing models to develop original ideas. In this sense, creativity is directly associated with a process of transformation of the current reality and most school textbooks can be used to develop strategies to form competent writers.

ASSUNTO(S)

text production produção de texto autonomia school textbooks livro didático autonomy

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