The training of teacher-educators as mediators of literature: working with the "Tell Me" approach by Aidan Chambers

Abstract

This text aims to understand how teachers participating in a research study appropriated the "tell me" approach as they experienced it. To this end, two training contexts for reading mediators at the Federal University of Goiás were examined: one at the Special Academic Unit of Human Sciences, Goiás Campus, and the other at the Faculty of Education, Colemar Natal e Silva Campus. Thus, we present the participants' statements during two literary conversation sessions. The first was developed from the short story "A moça tecelã" by Marina Colasanti (1991), and the second from the work "O mundo de Pedro: ameaça e alerta" by Sally Grindley and Michael Foreman (1996). In both analyzed episodes, we observed how the mediator occupies a central and essential place during the mediation sessions. Besides choosing the work and reciting the text, the mediator establishes an environment of listening, conversation, dialogue, questions, clarifications, and meaning-making about the text during the conversation. Furthermore, attentive observation of gestures and open ears to words and silences allow the mediator to build bridges between the works and the readers, and to break down barriers. Finally, the episodes analyzed also confirm another important fact: the "tell me" approach represents an excellent possibility for working with books in school settings, whether in Basic Education or at the University level.