Introduction

Methodology

In the field of studies on reading and writing there has been collaborative research and reflection on one’s own practice (see for instance ^{Frisch and Stoppani’s compilation 2014}, and more recently Marucco’s, in press). We refer to these areas to situate our type of work in regard to both kinds of research since the analysis presented here has been conducted both in collaboration and based on reflecting about each one of the participant’s practice. We also aspire to make a methodological contribution to the field of Literacy studies from the angle of what can be researched in collaboration and reflection on one’s own practice.

In 2014, a team working in a public university of Buenos Aires’ urban area began to design a proposal to document and analyze reading and writing practices with a formative potential. At the end of 2015 we presented it to the university where several of us teach and do research. In that formulation we found that some of the research team members were at the same time university workers (researchers) and participants or coordinators of reading and writing experiences in different contexts (schools, universities, cultural centers, self-organized neighborhood collectives, prisons, etc.). Thus, our collective research subject is characterized by being a complex integration of activist-researchers, university students and teachers who want to do research on our own practices and, along with others, on their practices as well.

Our initial design sought to identify working collectives whose approach to reading and writing could be described as formative - broadly defined at that time as reading and writing practices, and that at the same time were specific to the literary field - questioned the context into which they were placed to lead to transformations, put up for debate common sense notions of “literate / illiterate” or “reading and writing”, and could be thought of as actions that generated meanings and discourses on justice and access to rights of groups of people usually subdued or infringed upon.

Our project began to be implemented between 2016 and 2017, and in 2018 we linked it to 25 experiences of work with reading and writing carried out in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires in which their participants identified the aforementioned orientation. After the first contact about this project we established different relationships with each collective, with the exception that the first step was the same for all the experiences: we carried out a self-administered survey to, on the one hand, examine some positions regarding the basic notions that our project sought to explore, and on the other hand, find out the degree of interest of the participants in the experiences to carry out collaborative work.

After we established these relationships, we generated different documentation tools that, as a whole, we could describe as follows: in-depth interviews with participants in the experiences and organizations; self-recording and transcription in full of such interviews; review together with the participants of the interviews and later conversations about them; ethnographic recording logs by the participants and ethnographic logs when working with members of the team; visual (photographs, sketches, diagrams, drawings) and audiovisual records. Based on this documentary archive we began to work with the material in successive meetings, in different configurations (small groups and/or the extended group) to distinguish nuclei of meaning reiterated among the experiences, differences unique to each experience, explanatory constructs generated by the experiences themselves in their self-ethnography and ethnography accompanied by the others, and systematization of these nuclei of meaning to generate conceptual categories to explore. The process is explained in further detail below.

Also, and through a website still under construction, we are mapping geographically the location of the experiences, referring them to each other, and making them visible (to themselves and to a broader audience). The tools used were reviewed over and over. Thus, the surveys and interviews that were constructed at first as tools for exploration served as the foundations for the dialog, ongoing documentation, analytical exchange that gave life to this article and other collective writings in progress.

Shortly after having made contact with the experiences and in dialog with one of them in particular, the interest in the concept of formative potential arose and it was suggested to change it to that of transformative potential. It became clear that formative, as an adjective, seemed to have a shaping, top-to-bottom bias, as if something external could give shape, educate, and even perhaps exert a sort of defining violence on practices that seemed to have a more dynamic, uncertain and open, and thus (trans)formative potential. On the other hand, the transformative concept included the transformation in those who carry out the practices as equal participant subjects, and not thee traditional division of users/professionals or students/teachers. We adopted this approach to continue the work of surveying and analyzing the experiences, adding to this notion the importance of the body in situation, which arose from the first early survey as an important issue to pay attention to. In our conceptualization of the transformative it became important to acknowledge the power of the action and the body in situation, adopting for that the concept of performative (^{Butler, 2017}).

Between 2018 and 2020 we carried out a number of repetitive steps:

The last three steps had already been used in previous projects (e.g. ^{Heras et al., 2014}).

Development

Interpreting the potential for transformation in subjectivity and institutions

In order to discuss the notion of transformative potential through the experiences studied, an aim already stated at the beginning of this paper, we have presented above an analytical description of each experience, situating each one in its context and complexity and taking into account the nuclei of meaning explained in the section about our methodology. We will now delve into an interpretive analysis, describing points in common, and then present some results in regards to the question of in what (contextually situated) ways these experiences sustain and develop a potential for transformation, both for the group that carries it out and in regard to the organizational context in which they take place.

First, in regards to the points in common, those identified as the subjects of the practices include both those who design and implement them as their beneficiaries, thus constituting an heterogeneous set made up of users of the health care and the educational systems (from babies to students of the tertiary level), families (with different configurations), teachers, psychopedagogues, librarians, among others. In principle, this heterogeneous relationship between the usually called “users” and “professionals” takes place within each experience. However, in our research work we found that many of these spaces know, refer to and communicate with each other. By starting work on the project presented here, furthermore, other modes of systematic exchange between experiences were constructed that, as we said at the beginning, are also characterized by the fact that those who carry them out assume simultaneously different roles. For instance, we participate in socio-communal experiences in our neighborhoods associated to reading and writing, and we are also teachers in different educational levels (primary, secondary, tertiary, and college), or we work in the public sector (health, education, hospitals, social work in neighborhoods) and carry out reading and writing experiences in those environments and at the same time in our communities. The fact that the definition of the subjects involved encompasses this variety allows us to come up with a notion of collective subject generated after an encounter between people, beyond the formal roles played in these practices (teacher, student, physician, patient). Within the organizations (hospital or school), this fact generates a questioning of the habitual discourse modes: for instance, stereotypical ways to start conversations between physician and patient, teacher and student, family and health care or educational institution.

Secondly, to continue with the similarities between experiences regarding the materials, languages and formats involved in the practices, we observed a great diversity: orality, silences, gestures, visual language, poetry, music, art. Since reading and writing take place in a multi-textual way, these experiences are reshaping the notions of reading and writing themselves.

Finally, in regards to the infrastructure, we identified that the experiences are often shaped by the confluence of different governmental programs and are part of a complex web of institutional links and belongings, between which they seem to offer practices that run across through a particular exercise with reading and writing. Therefore, we are in the presence of novel ways of conducting public policies, since the collective subjects that carry them out reshape them in their daily work.

Transformation of subjectivity through reading and writing

In the experiences analyzed, reading and writing practices are linked to the possibility of constructing narratives, imagining other possible worlds, inaugurating other forms of sensibility in which the body occupies a central place. They are characterized by openness to the uncertain, listening to and reading what is happening at every particular moment. In the experience “Readings in diversity” this form of working becomes an approach open to listening and people are invited to read and play starting from the idea that we all someone’s other and seeking to deconstruct the notion of a stigmatized other. The game proposes an implicit pact linked to deploying different outlooks, actions, movements, creations, faced with a reality that may seem to be established: professionals/families, health/illness; Argentines/foreigners, between some of the interpretive referential and common sense schemes that take place in the hospital. Multiple reading possibilities of the same event open up through the activities because we are working with children, families, and professionals together, narrating or re-narrating what is not at first put into words, or what might arise as unexpected. This demands an active listening by those who coordinate the space, an opening of the senses to capture what is happening in that moment and be able to read it in the interactions so as not to interfere with their deployment. The team calls this practice “the possibility of working with what is taking place”.

Something similar happens in H.’s school when he refers to the work done with his students and the possibilities of opening a space linked to playing and imagination associated to narration, since he has identified that reading produces an “active calm that beat awake in the children, who were ‘lost’ in their imagination, an interesting function for literature in school”. In the words of the teacher who carried out this experience, “it seemed as if they were sailing away, and they laughed, made comments, got excited, shared. The garden of sensibility bloomed with all its petals. It worked also because no one asked “Teacher, why are you reading that story?” or “How does it help me to listen to literature?” It’s no use trying to measure how it works. You cannot quantify excitement. It’s impossible to put sensibility or transformation of consciousness in numbers. Although we have no empirical record, we know that something happened, an event took place. Potential became action.”

That is why reading is a possible interpretation of what is happening, both for those who coordinate the activity and for the children who participate in it. In this way, an opening to the other dimension of reality where people talk and play comes into being.

The participants in “Readings in diversity” refer to these states as “shared daydreaming”. These experiences aim to encourage readers to work in that dimension that resembles what writer Julio Cortázar defined as fantastic:

There are some sort of small parentheses in reality where a sensibility prepared for that kind of experiences feels the presence of something different, where one feels, in other words, what we may call the fantastic. […] the rules of logic, the causality of time, of space, all that our intelligence has accepted since the time of Aristotle as immovable, secure and still, is suddenly shaken, as if moved by a sort of inner wind that displaces them and makes them change (^{Cortázar, 1982}).

It is an encounter that does not seek effectiveness but the expression of subjectivities. An event that we can perceive as beauty, for when an experience is sensible it moves body and emotion, touches the vital, surprises us, and becomes an act of beauty (^{Martínez, 2016}).

In consonance with the ludic dimension alluded to, the Counter-Marathon appears to be constant in the different editions of this experience. The ludic aspect is central to the reading and writing practices proposed, and is often combined with the circulation in spaces not foreseen by schools. These aspects acquired special relevance in the closing of the 2016 edition with the “Poetic airplanes” experience, which also called for collective work between students of the teachers’ college and librarians, who folded the paper planes and took them in a basket to a seventh grade classroom together with a selection of poetry books. The children were invited to read them and choose stanzas, songs, limericks, or any verses they liked to write them on the paper planes and then share them with the younger children in the school. Armed with the poeticized planes, the children in seventh grade walked to the second floor terrace, where they spend their recess, and waited for the hour when the first and second grade students were in recess to launch the planes. A little surprised, but excited and shouting, the little children received the paper planes in the schoolyard and although at first they paid no attention to the texts written on them, after a while they began to read in groups the poetry that had flown towards them from the terrace. These ludic experiences, where the body is in play, broaden the symbolic as well as the real space, showing other ways in which the school can be inhabited.

Since the Library “Lobo ¿estás?” caters to very young children and their parents, its literature is linked to the utterance of the children’s first words and the student parents’ construction of their identities in the dual role of being adolescent parents as well as students. To this exercise of their roles is added the experience of a different relationship with books and images, remembering experiences from their own childhoods and constructing new ones in which reading questions and moves them in other possible ways. Words cover narratively the silence that introduces the dialog, the closeness of a bond that accompanies and sustains lovingly, the metaphor that allows for their encounter and acknowledgement with themselves through the other.

This openness to another dimension of reality linked to daydreaming, to being lost, a loving encounter, to the ludic, is what enables the transformative possibility of subjectivity in these experiences. H. speaks of an emancipatory process linked to reading literature, since there are figures of intellectual activity that reading fosters: for instance, anticipation (a prediction made by articulating the clues found in the text) or the attribution of meaning (an interpretation, a production, a creation, which is a product of collective reading).

Definitely, reading involves taking on a challenge. There is something to be solved, to decipher, a puzzle - although it may not have been posed as such. Reading is placing oneself in an active position of work and artisan, not commercial, production. Interpretation is work, putting together. And its production is a joint effort: one reads with the others and thanks to the others. It is the fabric of the community workshop. Placing oneself is emancipating because the individual knows that he/she knows, is aware of his/her capacity to understand and produce. One does not receive passively, as if one were an object, as if one were the depository of an external consciousness. One inserts oneself thus into the stage of history as a protagonist, the leading actor with a story to be written. Alienation is the detachment from desire. An alienated person is one who has no contact with his/her desires, with his/her sources of pleasure. Literature can also repair that link, so it is also dis-alienating.

In “Readings in diversity” there is also a relationship with the emancipatory. The purpose is to create a space of freedom for each participant to narrate himself/herself from another place, perhaps different from where others place him/her. This process is called in the group “the advent of the subjective”; that is, a becoming of each one of those singularities, those stories and those genealogies as well. Thus, the narrative is linked with the individual’s subjectivity and the possibility of constructing other, perhaps unexpected, stories.

In the “Lobo ¿estás?” Library, the transformative character of the literary is clear. A space is opened for the narrative and the poetic to circulate, to inhabit those bodies, to open fictional horizons so life itself is transformed, or at least tries to. In the construction of the reader’s road, the duty of the Library is to offer different spaces and alternatives so that the students may link themselves to the literary word in all its meanings and may transcend the dichotomies between reading as a school obligation and reading for pleasure. Thus, the “Lobo, ¿estás?” Library seeks to transcend this dichotomy, to tension the idea of the existence of a literature for adults and another literature for babies and children, and to vindicate the place of the image in readings for adolescents and adults.

The design of the Counter-Marathon as a situated practice, willing to act with others and have others act in that situation, open to randomness and to the surprise of the readers, questions teachers and future teachers as mediators, and demands that they think of the children not only as mere receptors, but as constructors of their own and of collectives meanings, as the very makers of encounters.

We believe that the ludic experience and the spatial journeys describe involve broadening the experience and changing the position of individuals. To provide an account of the multiplicity of ways to learn to read of those who participate in these experiences, we will describe now a situation that took place in one of them:

A sixty year old lady came with her grandson to the service. He entered the library and said “This is where I first played an instrument! Now I have a ukulele”. Passionate about the history of Argentina, he borrowed Pigna’s graphic novel and his grandmother began to tell me that he loves to read. I invited her to explore the library and she became enthusiastic with a book that she also borrowed. She told me that she had never been to school, that she only went there to eat, that she had been very poor as a young girl and because she had “other thoughts” she ran away from class, but that she learned to read on her own, looking at magazines. She realized that one letter after another formed words, and learned to guess their meaning by their context. I asked her if she was interested in any poetry book and she said “No, thanks, I already read a lot of that, I prefer this one”. And she took a novel.

Based on what has been said so far, we argue that these experiences allow us to see the (contextually situated) ways in which the potentials for transformation are sustained and developed. It also allows us to maintain the notion that this transformation is a permanent representation, and with that notion we may then also show the performative potential of this type of educational, artistic and organizational positioning.

Questioning the institutional context

As we mentioned above, most of the experiences take place within complex institutional networks because they have different ownerships (since their positions are supported through different governmental programs or departments) and even different trainings and discipline practices. What they have in common is that to some degree they manage to transform both the team that carries them out and some hegemonic rationales present in the institutions where they take place. For instance, “Readings in diversity” is part of the hegemonic health care system. We believe that it has an effect of transformation on the culture of hospitals: the narrative inside the doctor’s office changes because those who go to the service and participate in the activities conducted in the library begin to have a different position towards the physicians and value their own narrative better. Achieving this has taken over 20 years, which is the time that this experience has been taking place in this health care service. There is now an acknowledgement that the space has to do with a specific way to offer this health care service. Despite this, it has sometimes been seen that the families that come to this hospital, and in particular to the ambulatory pediatrics service, perceive two different spaces: the doctor’s office, with its own forms of interaction, and the library. We realized this when a child that was doing an activity in the library and heard a doctor call him told us “I’m going to the other hospital”.

In the case of the classroom practices in H.’s school, at the same time as the primary school isolation is questioned, the teacher’s subjectivity is transformed. One of the issues that always concerned H. is the one that links learning in the school with learning in daily life, both for educators and for students and families. Thus, H. tried to form groups of work and reflection on the teacher’s practice, or participate in sporadic moments of encounter with other workers in culture and the arts, wondering what relationship we can find between learning to read texts and learning to read the world, what aspects of reading are linked to the arts, to aesthetic enjoyment and the construction of ways to interpret (works of art or other issues) that allow us to expand what we know. Based on these questions, he contacted other colleagues in the same school since the institutions we inhabit, due to their organizational structure, tend to isolate us. Especially in connection to reading, writing, arts, and school, H. and his “primary school” carried out several experiences that he describes as a “collective pedagogical-cultural construction process”.

As for the “Lobo ¿estás?” Library, its presence in the day care room of a middle school encourages encounters. Its aim is an institutional coexistence centered fundamentally on reading. The library materializes one of the aims of the educational project of the day care room, which is to work in an articulated fashion and together with the middle school. This aim is assumed with the intention and the conviction of generating work spaces that involve and bring together teachers of different educational levels, in this case initial and middle, pupils of very different ages, as well as an interweaving of relationships that link motherhood, fatherhood, schooling and upbringing.

In regard to the Counter-Marathon, the possibility of taking the time to read in different ways puts into question an idea of reading that the marathon somehow represents: reading lots of books to win a competition. In another sense, the collective construction of the project, the movements in regard to fixed roles, the active position of different participants, circulating by not habitual spaces, lead to questioning what can become a habit in an institution, rigid places, loss of meaning. The organization of the Counter-Marathon always tries to be an invitation to read and not an imposition, and for this reason pays special attention to the opening activities, seeking a kind of “distancing” from order, as Graciela ^{Montes (2007)} says, with the aim of generating desire, provocation, or bewilderment.

Results and new questions

In the previous section we already outlined some relevant issues to continue deepening this approach to analysis that takes reading and writing as situated practices that, under certain conditions, enable the people who participate in them to construct multiple meanings, new readings of reality, new narratives, different positions towards what is taken as a given. These intersubjective movements, which in themselves question certain modes of the social in the institutions and organizations in which they take place or with whom they interact, are seen as continued, indeterminate and open processes. At the same time, we believe that the very reflection on their practice, description, and analysis allows us to have a theoretical approach to the relationships between reading, writing, organizational creation and change. We will now go into further detail about some aspects to be discussed.

As we have said, the reading practices to which we refer deliberately assume that reading implies an interpretive activity. In the analysis of the experiences appear several meanings of the term reading that we may relate to the theoretical framework of the NLS, which in their first formulation follow Freire: reading the world. We assume and seek to promote in the readers an intense activity in the construction of meanings not only of written texts and images, but also of readings of reality, of events. Those who accompany younger readers, children or babies read what is happening. Something akin to stopping, watching, being open, supporting, listening to the other, is put into play, producing sensible readings. In this sense, the scenes retrieved in the interviews come from a reading open to being surprised.

Readings are produced collectively. We read with a different other, in the logic of a collective construction where a plurality of different meanings are incorporated and articulated. “We read with the others, thanks to the others” as H. says.

The crossings and encounters of different participants that enrich the readings appear in all the experiences. In “Readings in diversity” it is maintained starting from its formulation: there are common constructions of common meanings supporting the specificities. Thus, professionals from different disciplines and ministries with different rationales, children and their caretakers who come from different cultures, create something new within the hospital and in the neighborhood activities later developed after the experience. The Counter-Marathon is defined as a collective construction in which individuals from different educational levels and different roles come together. In “Lobo, ¿estás?” different institutions and programs, adults with different roles and teacher training, babies and adolescent mothers or fathers with the tensions inherent to the institutional frameworks where they interact meet.

In some of these experiences the essay La gran ocasión. La escuela como sociedad de lectura, addressed to teachers, librarians and other mediators of reading who shares many of these convictions, has been alluded to. In it, with poetic language, Graciela ^{Montes (2007)} defines reading as “greed for meaning”, and the position of the reader as one of “insubordination and desire”. The subtitle anticipates that the school is an opportunity to produce this kind of readings. There is no depiction of the lonely, romanticized reader, but of the opportunity for exchange, for construction in the difference of voices. These conceptions of reading put in tension a school tradition of narrow comprehension that would have the readers “learn by heart” or “repeat with their own words” the text. They also challenge other, more contemporary versions of the same position, which become manifest in international evaluations. And finally, they also challenge and tension a certain widespread version of the “freedom of the reader” often confused with a “soft subjectivism” (^{Larrosa, 2008}) which would lead to an extremely individualistic posture like “reading is subjective”.

Finally, another aspect that appears very clearly is the importance of the ludic as a means to produce new readings for their power as a symbolic language and their relationship with the arts. Play shares the fictional character of literature, opening the possibility to enter another world and another dimension that requires a different time and sensibility. Literature is valued as a privileged reading because it opens fictional worlds. The four experiences make the value of the literary text clear. Collective encounters where play, literature and other arts produce readings and writings, support the emergence of one’s own word and that of the others, recognizing different and multiple authorships, new narratives, a new way of telling and taking a position.

So far we have mentioned some relevant issues that emerge from an analysis of the four experiences presented. We may argue that our approach, which sees reading and writing practices as constructions of transformation in continued, indeterminate and open processes, also allows us to identify subjective and intersubjective transformations, while they alert us about the transformations in the organizations in which they take place. Therefore, we note that this framework allows for a theoretical approach to the links between reading, writing, organizational creation and socio-political change.

In our work there is evidence that shows that the subjective transformations produced by this kind of activities are questioning socio-political structures. This evidence might be overlooked if we did not appeal to an analytical framework such as the one constructed for the interpretation of these practices. For instance, situations where the movement being produced in interaction is brought to the surface so that it allows the individuals involved to construct modes of linkage different from those to which they are usually subjected, which in the cases we have studied are often modes of naturalized institutional and structural violence. We argue that the approach adopted for our analysis allows us to take into account this evidence as it is, not as a casual anecdote or circumstance.

Nevertheless, we understand that a limitation of our study is that, in order to carry out the long-term ethnographic work that allowed us to continue corroborating how such questioning of structural violence takes place, we would need to conduct a study at other times and have the resources for an in-depth survey. Furthermore, the current conditions of the pandemic have imposed severe restrictions on that kind of methodologies. Although we are generating other methods to continue the work conducted so far, the world as we knew it is changing and we are still in the process of stabilization of different forms of production of transformative action and knowledge about it.

An in-depth study over a longer period will allow us, within the new paradigms we may generate to produce knowledge collectively, to incorporate further material of direct observation by the different members of the team, which we consider important for two reasons: the first, because our hypothesis is that we could gather more evidence about how the transformations and questionings of the dominant system take place, even - or especially - in times when the pandemic has exposed situations of deep injustice that in other times might be less visible; and the second is that we might even understand how such transformations may occur in other environments that are different and more challenging, but with situations similar to the ones observed through these experiences.

Also, and linked to the above, another limitation we found is that long periods are required to establish linkages like the ones we have achieved in this work of joint inquiry, periods that are not always available to everyone and that are usually obtained through a high degree of exposure to long hours of work. Although this is common for those who work in public spaces like all the authors of this article, that does not make it less difficult and - sometimes - alienating. Thus, the will to think together and theorize based on our experiences has overcome the difficulties of time and space, even in contexts of high vulnerability. We find it precarious that conceptualization work such as this depends upon our will.

First of all, we want to thank everyone involved in the experiences we have worked on. We would also like to mention that our research work was supported by funding from the Program “Humanidades Investiga” of the School for Humanities of the National University of San Martín and the Program “Aprendizaje de y en Autogestión” of both the UNSAM and the Institute for Social Inclusion and Human Development. This research work has also allowed us to lay the research foundations for the creation of the Masters’ Degree on Children’s and Young Adults’ Literature, being developed at CONEAU based on the Specialization on Children’s and Young Adults’ Literature.