“The community experience opened a horizon for me”: Literacy practices in youth pastoral groups of Guarulhos-SP

Abstract

In this article, we present the results of research on literacies that are configured within the scope of religion, specifically discussing the effects of these practices on young people in the town of Guarulhos (São Paulo - Brazil) as members of the Pastoral da Juventude (PJ), a Catholic social action organization with groups throughout Latin America. This qualitative investigation is based on literacy studies, with a socio-historical perspective (Kleiman, 1995) on decolonial studies (Hernandez-Zamora, 2019), and the social theory of learning (Lave, 2015a, 2015b). We investigate PJ as a youth and adult training agency and youth particpants as learners in this setting. We relied on the voluntary adherence of PJ members to carry out semistructured interviews during 2019 in the effort to understand how the participants gave meaning to these literacy practices, the possible effects of their participation in this training, and how they perceive themselves to be learning and building projects of life.