Date: Thursday, December 5th, 2019
Time: 2:00 -5:30 pm
Location: Neville Scarfe Library Block, Room 278
Speaker: Visiting Professor – Betânia Passos Medrado, PhD,
Associate Professor, Department of Modern Languages,
Post Graduation Programming in Linguistics Universidade Federal da Paraíba,
Centro de Ciências Humanas, Letras e Artes
Title: Brazilian Policies and inclusive education: an overview of language teachers’ main challenges in Brazilian regular schools
The current legislation regulating basic education in Brazil (Brasil, 2013) and the inclusion of students with specific educational needs in regular schools has prompted reflections on the discourse and actions in the field of language teacher education. Still, the implementation of inclusive practices in Brazilian schools has been a long and time-consuming process.There is still a great gap between political policies and the practices, especially those related to educational contexts. Most recently, the Brazilian Inclusion Law (LBI, Law 13.146/ 2015) was sanctioned with the purpose of putting together, in the same legislation, all the rights of disabled people. Therefore, this talk aims at discussing language teacher education in the light of the Brazilian Inclusion Law (2015) and based on the analysis of the articles 27 e 28. It evaluates which demands are presented as crucial to a current debate on language teacher education in my country. My reflection highlights that these articles bring implications, not only for the curricula of the language teacher education courses, but also for research and in-service teacher education programs. Examples of inclusive actions some teachers have put forward in their classes will be presented.