Subjetividade e avaliação no ensino da escrita no I ciclo do Ensino Fundamental de 9 anos

We discuss the diagnostic evaluation of children’s writing under the light of the ‘subject’, within a discursive view of language and a Lacanian view of subjectivity. Two questions steer the debate: (i) what skills do students show in their written pieces?; (ii) what can be taught them henceforth? These questions imply assessing objective knowledge and analyzing the positions students assume when writing their texts in response to a teacher’s demand, as well as discussing the teacher’s possible response to the students. We present analyses of four texts written by third graders from the Brazilian 9-year ‘Ensino Fundamental’. Each text shows a different degree of writing skill, but also a distinct position towards the demand – from scrawls that manifest an incipient ‘alienation’ to a narrative that willingly establishes a ‘separation’ from the text that has been read. Keywords: children’s writing, subjectivity, diagnostic evaluation.