“I Write Because I Want to Be Read”

decolonial Student Voices in the Construction of a School Newspaper in the Hinterlands of Paraíba

Abstract

This article analyzes the collaborative experience of producing a school newspaper by high school students from a federal public institution in the hinterlands of Paraíba, grounded in the Dialogical Theory of Language and Decolonial Studies. The initiative emerged from the need to reframe writing instruction as a situated, responsive, and ethical social practice, breaking with technicist and normative school models. This is a qualitative and intervention-based research, anchored in collaborative action research, with data generated through questionnaires applied before and after the newspaper production, students’ original texts, and the researcher’s  ield journal. Journalistic genres – especially the interview – were used as tools for listening, authorship, and circulation of historically silenced voices. The dialogical analysis of the data revealed significant shifts in students’ conceptions of writing, which came to be understood as a practice of authorship, community participation, and critical engagement with the world. The study concludes that school writing, when conceived from a decolonial and dialogical perspective, can become a space for epistemic reinvention and for the affirmation of students as legitimate producers of knowledge and discourse.