Cinema and writing (of oneself): experiences with secondary school students' writing

Abstract

The main objective of the proposed research is focused on the writing skills of evening course secondary school pupils in a public school located in an area in the outskirts of the city of São José dos Campos, São Paulo state, which displays both urban and rural characteristics. The material to be used in order to motivate the pupils towards writing will be the screening of cinematographic films by directors of different nationalities as well as the production by the students themselves of short duration videos. The focuses of the research are on the argumentation techniques to be performed on the texts and, hence, on the ability of maintaining the theme along the text. These aspects have shown to be very fragile on this type of pupils. Together with the work on reasoning and theme consistency, other aspects of text production (such as cohesion, coherency and concordance with writing modality depending on the text type) will be studied. The theoretical background will be the junction of two mutually complementary fields - the French discourse analysis and the Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis. Considering that the cinema is an efficient instrument for subjective (as well as educational and emotional) motivation in the same way that are the writing and especially "the writing of oneself, it is expected that this will enlarge pupils' cultural universe by means of the writing and consequently compel them to reflect about themselves and about their places in a social and historical context. (AU)