A Reflexion About the Historical Course of the Brazilian Sign Language: School, Official Documents and Fighting Discrimination

• Autor(a) principal: Vieira, Alessandra Jacqueline
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Outros Autores: Hilário, Rosângela Nogarini [UNESP]
• Tipo de documento: Capítulo de livro
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UNESP
• Texto Completo: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13544-6_7; http://hdl.handle.net/11449/247428
• topic: Brazilian sign language; Official documents; School

This article focuses on reflecting on the use of Brazilian Sign Language (LIBRAS) in different social situations and spheres of activity, such as schools, problematizing situations of discrimination that, historically, deaf people experience. LIBRAS is a visuospatial language, used by members of the deaf community in Brazil and which, despite having been recognized by Law 10.436 (Brazil) in 2002, after intense struggles by the deaf community, is still socially discredited, not always accessible to this community in all social spaces. If we assume that it is in and through the language we are constituted - and language is portrayed here as a vehicle of ideological meanings, whose senses are historically and socially constructed, from the interaction between persons and between discourses (Bakhtin 2016) - when an individual is deprived of the use of their language, there is also an impediment to developing their language skills, also impacting their experiences and their development in different aspects. Although there is an indication and some advances in the inclusion of LIBRAS in different environments, especially after Law Decree No. 5.626 (Brazil), many social spheres of human activity, such as the school, still exclude the deaf subject, because they do not provide accessibility in sign language. In this sense, to reflect on the questions we propose here, we will discuss how, in the course of history, some official documents in Brazil, such as the new LDB (Law of Directives and Bases) (approved in 2021) and the BNCC (National Common Curricular Base), have been incorporating issues related to this theme, and moreover, from reports of some deaf people on social networks (like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook), we intend to reflect on how this history of struggle and changes in legislation have allowed changes in the social conception of the identity of deaf individuals and possible social transformations from the use of this language by the deaf community in Brazil.