3 de September de 2026
Teaching children to read and write is not only about teaching them to decode words, but about bringing them into written culture and into the world of knowledge. The statement was made by Beatriz Cardoso, Labedu’s Strategic Advisor, during a meeting promoted by the Laboratory of Studies and Research in Education and Social Economy (Lepes) at USP, in partnership with the University’s Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA). The event, held on August 21 and led by Lepes coordinator Daniel Santos, addressed the theme “Effective methods and strategies for teaching children to read and write, and the challenges of large-scale implementation.”
The meeting is part of a cycle of debates bringing together literacy specialists. In addition to Beatriz, participants included Eliseu Coutinho de Macedo, a professor at Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie, and Joan Edesson de Oliveira, a pedagogue who worked at the Municipal Department of Education of Sobral.
In her presentation, Beatriz proposed a shift in framing for the debate on literacy. According to her, the field tends to look for a single party responsible for insufficient results—whether the method, the teaching materials, or the teacher—which has kept the discussion stagnant for decades. For the advisor, methodological choice matters, but it is only part of a broader problem involving the interaction among children, teachers, schools, management, and policy. Before discussing methods, she argued, it is necessary to build the capacities required at each of these levels of the system.
Beatriz also posed a question that precedes the methodological discussion: what is the purpose of teaching children to read and write today? She advances the view that teaching children to read and write means bringing them into written culture and into the world of knowledge, not merely teaching a graphic system. This means developing readers who can infer, interpret, integrate information, evaluate evidence, and argue, as well as engage critically with texts in digital environments.
The advisor argued that decoding and comprehension do not follow a sequential order, but develop simultaneously from a very early age. For Beatriz, language should be understood as cognition: it is through language that the child learns to hypothesize, infer, and interpret, while also appropriating written language itself.
Beatriz also presented the dual-focus concept that guides Labedu’s methodology, grounded in the ideas of Argentine researcher Ana Teberosky: the same learning process that takes place for the child, starting from the text, should take place for the teacher, starting from observed, analyzed, and thematized practice.
For the advisor, the central challenge of Brazilian literacy is to build systems that continuously develop teachers’ professional capacity. “The objective of a public policy cannot be the method, but rather the building of professional capacity,” she stated.
At the end of her presentation, Beatriz returned to a quote from Ana Teberosky to synthesize her perspective: literacy should be understood as a knowledge program, mediated by culture and by interaction with other people, more complex than any isolated methodological discussion can capture.
Watch the full presentation: