Making It Work in the Global South: Stories of Digital Divides in a Brazilian Context

Being literate in the 21st century inevitably involves the ability to design, redesign, and make meaning from processes and products afforded by digital technologies (Bass, 2014). However, as Rowsell, Morrell, and Alvermann (2017) highlight, it suggests a world where everyone has constant access to technologies, apps, and social media, and this is simply not the case for many people. In what concerns language learning, Canagarajah (2005) states that students in the language classroom should be provided with opportunities for language socialization, and he claims that the act of locally appropriating English calls for orienting English-language development to a globalization from below. In this way, students reclaim their local identity and voice their place-based beliefs (Prinsloo, 2005), while at the same time focusing on community and culture. In other words, students’ marginalized voices speak. As Moita Lopes (2006) states, the biggest challenge for educators nowadays is to produce knowledge that is also meaningful to people who suffer on the margins of society—the voices from the South. In this chapter, we explore a group of students learning English as an additional language in a public school on the outskirts of Uberlândia, in Brazil, to examine some possibilities and constraints on how they are able to translate literacy into practice and express through meaning-making what counts as relevant to them. We have come together as researchers to analyze a research project concerned with introducing a critical/multi-literacies approach in English teaching. We conclude, by drawing on Compton-Lilly and Halverson (2014), with the assertion that when it comes to literacy, we cannot help being involved, engaged, and interact with what really surrounds us.