Culture circles, conscientization, and agency: The evolving narratives of two brazilian women

Abstract

This paper analyzes how two women in Northeastern Brazil narrate their experiences of dropping-out of school as children as a result of the socio-economic-political context in place and of returing to a participatory education adult literacy program, the culture circles (Freire, 1959). We employ narrative analysis (ochs & Capps, 2001) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclought, 2003) to show how linguistic resources are used to convey agency and moral stance (Rymes, 1995) in these women's narratives and how their acquisition of agency and engaged practical embodiment is enacted through linguistic resources used in their stories. Their narratives changed from portraying themselves as helpless victims in which they oriented to an external and abstract sense of goodness due to someone else's action (dropping-out narratives) to perceiving themselves as active (hooks, 1991) agents, following collectively generated moral sources as they joined circles of culture and engaged in problem-posing, dialogue and problem-solving (Freire and Macedo, 1996).