Foregrounding learners’ voices: Enabling zones of audacity

ABSTRACT

This article examines learning activities at Projeto Clicar, a program designed for meninas na rua, children living on the streets of São Paulo. These activities exemplified key aspects of the co-construction of zones of proximal development among learners and demonstrated how those learners were able to transform the depth and nature of their participation in activity over time. We illustrate how educators supported children’s learning by co-constructing zones of audacity, emphasizing the audacity of learners’ voices¹—their situated self-placement in sociocultural activity. Activating these zones enabled participants to build on their own understandings and transform their participation in program activities.

In a space set aside within Estacão Ciencia,² a science museum sponsored by the Universidade de São Paulo, Projeto Clicar (Project “Click”) was established for meninas na rua, children living and working and precariously struggling to survive on the streets of São Paulo, Brazil. Many of these children often earned spare change by begging or by helping out the street vendors on the square just outside Projeto Clicar (Clicar). The hardships the meninas na rua faced included their ongoing search to find food to eat, to find places to wash and go to the bathroom, to find transportation, to avoid the usually unsympathetic police, and to secure shelter from rain and the many perils of the night, both human and environmental. Clicar provided young people, age five to seventeen, both temporary respite from the inextricable weight of their young lives on the street and the opportunity to co-create and engage in a variety of digital and hands-on activities to which they otherwise would have had no access. The young people and educators who participated in Clicar rarely sat alone at a computer; they generally formed small groups that shifted and changed over time, as individuals moved from one activity to another on their own initiative.

First-time visitors to Clicar often perceived a chaotic cacophony of raucous play, a mélange of random activity, a polyphonic pastiche of excited speech and argumentation over game rules, their conversations accentuated by the predominance of São Paulo street slang. Regular participants at Clicar, both children of all ages and the educators, sensed a rousing symphonic samba of voices that rose and fell, wildly moving between resonance and dissonance and back, again and again, and constantly introducing new themes that played off each other in intricate variations until they chorused together in unison, culminating in a stirring crescendo of young voices when Clicar closed at the end of the day. Experienced participants at Clicar, both children of all ages and the educators, came to view it as a free and open space, with a culture of exuberant collaborative activity, where children were continually encouraged to find and avidly pursue their own interests with whomever they wished.

Introduction

In this article we explore how the idea of learners’ voices enables educators and researchers to problematize the development of learning environments, especially for young people who have been historically marginalized or excluded from mainstream educational resources and activities. We focus on the learning activities at Clicar as a critical response to the dire social circumstances and hazards which the young people who attended Clicar faced in their lives on the street. Toward this end, we examine innovative learning activities at Clicar, a youth development program with learning activities specifically designed for meninas na rua. In this context, it is important to recognize that Clicar was designed for these young people not as an educational environment, but as a safe space, away from the harsh realities of the street, for the exploration of learning resources and other support services to which most of them had always lacked access. Clicar was a program that focused primarily on enabling these marginalized young people, with minimal guidance from educators, to find and express their voices in the effort to discover, critically understand, and transform their place in the world.

In the ethnographic account which follows, we illustrate how educators encouraged and supported young people’s learning by focusing on learners’ voices in what we call zones of audacity. We introduce zones of audacity as an idea directly related to the zone of proximal development (Vygotsky, 1978) that focuses on the audacity of learners’ voices and the explicitly agentive character of individual learners’ roles and actions in this zone, as they respond to educators or others who attempt shape their experience and enact their own learning agendas. We suggest that this agentive stance is key to learners’ development from lower to higher cognitive functions and that it has often been underplayed in discussions of the concept of the zone of proximal development. However, we do not view the idea of zones of audacity as replacing the concept of zone of proximal development but as an orienting idea applicable to learning environments in which the encouragement of agency is both relevant and revelatory. We further suggest that the idea of zones of audacity enlivens our view of the learning process and makes it directly observable and vivid in evoking how this process comes about among historically situated actors in real-world settings.

We define the audacity of learners as a form of vocal self-determination, their expressive stance or situated self-placement in sociocultural activity – how they make themselves effectively heard among others. In this regard, audacity is performative and grounded in everyday activity; it encompasses the person’s agentive stance among others and in its performance, enhances the person’s capacity to “read” and define and even re-define the social situation in which they find themselves.

The word “audacity” derives from the Greek word, audē, which in the context of music indicates the sound produced by the plucking of the stretched bowstring of a musical instrument such as the lyre, and by implication refers to the production of an artful sound. Similarly, audē, in other contexts, signifies the human voice, the capacity for speech (Cunliffe, 2012), and in the context of social interaction, implies the skilled projection of voice, and beyond that, even the distinctive voicing of an effective speaker. Following Underwood (2018), we define audacity as the production of voice – the projection of voice as an act of self-placement, of asserting one’s rightful place in a social scene or context. Here, we draw on Silver and Clark’s (2016) definition of social scene as a shared form or locus of activity, or the shared sense of – or attachment to – place as a locus of meaning-making activity. As such, audacity may be viewed both as an act of resistance to social displacement by others, and as an integrative act of self-definition and self-transformation – an act of answering for oneself the challenge presented by what Bakhtin (1981) has called the authoritative voice, the constraining context of social dominance in which every individual utterance, every attempt at voicing one’s perspective, takes place. Audacity, in this sense, may be viewed as the agentive expression of self among others; following Mead (1934, 1965) in this context, we view the “self” as being not a fixed psychological entity but an emergent and hopefully expansive sense of one’s place and role among others. As such, our approach to audacity also poses the speaker’s voice as audacious – daring to take bold risks – that is, persuasive and authoritative in itself, calling for the recognition by others of one’s own distinctively powerful and thus answerable position among them. To frame this statement in terms of the agency or emergent self-placement of the speaker, we suggest that in communicative acts of audacity, speakers pose their own voices as authoritative and worthy of others’ attentiveness.

As such, for the children at Clicar, the performative projection of their voices in the act of self-placement constituted their primary tool for learning about the world around them and their place – and ultimately their self-placement – within that world, either resisting it or acting upon it vocally. We suggest that the program educators’ care, their proactive openness in co-creating and collaborating with the young people at Clicar to activate these zones of audacity, enabled them to build on their own backgrounds and understandings and to actively “take over” and reshape the activities in which they were engaged. In the process, the young people transformed not only their depth of participation but also the nature of their participation in the activities in which they were engaged (Rogoff, 1996).

Projeto Clicar: Participation in place

Projeto Clicar took place in a centrally located, busy transit area (as contrasted to the city’s more residential neighborhoods, both poor and more affluent) of São Paulo within a science museum called Estação Ciência (the Science Station). The building where the museum was located had formerly been an old factory and was regarded as one of the city’s historic landmarks, which the Universidade de São Paulo (USP), working in collaboration with the city, occupied and transformed into a science museum. Estação Ciência offered a wide range of exhibits, activities, and demonstrations offering opportunities for visitors to engage with scientific knowledge and inquiry. The museum was originally designed to serve school children and their teachers, but when it opened, the educators, coauthors Dirce Pranzetti and Cecilia Toloza), and a team of staff and student associates from the Universidade de São Paulo, noticed that a number of children, visibly distinctive from the school children and unaccompanied by teachers, began to frequent the museum. The educators realized that these were meninas na rua who came initially just to get off the streets into a relatively protected space, but afterward kept returning, fascinated with the variety of exhibits and hands-on and digital activities the museum offered.

Rather than turn away these children, the educators, supported by the museum’s visionary director, Professor Ernst Hamburger, a world-renowned physicist, designated a part of the museum as a separate space with a set of digital and hands-on program activities designed explicitly for meninas na rua. In this way, Estação Ciencia and Clicar became a key component of the Universidade de São Paulo’s efforts to engage with their local communities, and when coauthors Charles Underwood and Mara Welsh Mahmood learned about Clicar and began to communicate with their Brazilian colleagues, Dirce and Cecilia, by e-mail, they discovered that USP was pursuing an approach to university-community engagement that was comparable to that of University-Community Links (UC Links) at the University of California (as discussed in Underwood et al., 2021). Both universities sought to establish long-term sustainable collaboration with their local communities through programs that supported the development of historically marginalized young people through programs that linked them in joint learning activities with university students. Similarly, although it was independently envisioned and established, Clicar practiced certain pedagogical and organizational strategies that were similar to those used in UC Links programs, emphasizing the premises of problem-posing pedagogies based on learners’ background knowledge (Freire, 1970), the importance of children’s learning through play and (Freinet, 1993; Vygotsky, 1978), and the collaborative development of institutionalized out-of-school activity systems through the dynamic relations of exchange between university and community partners (Cole, 1996; Cole & Distributive Literacy Consortium, 2006; Lalueza et al., 2020; Underwood et al., 2021; Vásquez, 2003³). For over seventeen years, Clicar operated Monday through Friday from about 12pm to 6pm throughout the calendar year and its educators persistently offered young people facing severe conditions of social exclusion new learning tools and activities within the museum, until the museum itself closed in 2013 (Underwood et al., 2021).

The children who frequented Clicar convened from a variety of neighborhoods throughout the expansive Brazilian city. Several days a week, some of the children would walk more than two hours to get to Clicar. An average of about 1,000 meninas na rua, ranging in age from five to seventeen years, attended on a regular basis annually. Not all of the children attended on the same day; on any given day, approximately 50–75 young people would flow through the program, arriving and departing at various times during the hours Clicar was open. Most of them were not in school, had never been to school, or had only attended school for a year or two. When they arrived at Clicar, they voluntarily entered a space where they could explore a variety of digital tools and other hands-on resources – board games, art activities, picture books, etc. The program provided little or no formal instruction, yet there were always educators at hand (including both credentialed professionals and trained university students) on whom the children could rely for guidance when they were unable to solve a problem for themselves.

The children learned to engage in these varied activities through voluntary interaction with each other and with the educators, who often participated with them as equal partners in the digital and hands-on activities. The team of educators was specifically trained not to “instruct” the children or tell them what to do or how to do it, but simply to ask them questions and guide them to work together and build on each other’s knowledge in whatever activities they chose to engage (Freire, 1970). The educators explicitly pursued pedagogies emphasizing Freinet’s (1993) view on the efficacy of children’s learning through play and Rancière’s (1991) focus on empowering disenfranchised young people by animating their desire to learn for themselves. While it was a deliberate pedagogical decision on the part of the educators to keep the program participation voluntary (and not regulate children’s attendance or engagement in any way), the educators who worked at Clicar, including both its directors and the university students they trained to work directly with the children, supported participants through various forms of face-to-face counseling and assistance in finding food, clothing, and shelter for the night (Underwood et al., 2017).

The educators at Clicar were actively attuned to discovering the interests of particular children and exposing them to specific digital and hands-on resources and activities that enabled them to pursue their personal interests more deeply in individual or small-group activities. The overall objective of this individualized approach was to create a space that was adaptable for everybody, interacting together or engaging separately, as they wished, but all participating in their chosen ways in the same program space. The kinds of activities the educators developed were adapted and elaborated to serve the particular needs, interests, and vulnerabilities of the particular children who frequented Clicar. In this sense, Clicar and its activities offered participants both a third space (Gutiérrez, 2008), separate from the unforgiving socio-political and institutional constraints of the larger society, and a distinctive social scene (Silver & Clark, 2016), where they were able to feel comfortable and safe – to be who they were or wanted to be and to develop skills and knowledge for adapting to their circumstances while making the difficult transition from childhood to adolescence. Importantly, the program’s focus was explicitly on the collaborative learning among the young people themselves, as opposed to “teaching” the young people through didactic instructional activities.

Activities at Clicar included a range of digital and hands-on activities. The educators set up the computers in round pods with the computer screens facing outward so that the children faced inward toward each other, thereby facilitating and intensifying the interaction among participants. The computers were loaded with educational software games, such as The Lion King, Pajama Sam, Freddi Fish, and in the late 1990s also connected to the Internet so they could engage with various websites, watch videos, listen to music, and create documents, short videos, and other digital products. Along the walls of Clicar’s space within the museum, there were shelves with books, comic books, board games, and art supplies. There were benches for the children to sit and read and talk to each other, and there were several round tables for them to draw, paint, and co-construct art projects using modeling clay or cardboard or other types of hands-on projects with others.

In this way, the specific character of the children’s participation, though initially conditioned by their own life circumstances of living and working on the streets, over time came to be framed by the artifacts with which they engaged and by the peer-to-peer interactions that took place through the mediation of those artifacts. In time, through their collaborative engagement in a shared system of learning, the character of their individual participation changed – they came to recognize themselves and others as partners in a shared cultural domain (Cole, 1996; Cole & Distributive Literacy Consortium, 2006) or “figured world” (Holland et al., 1998). As they built on their cumulative experiences with the artifacts and activities in the program, they also came to recognize the continuities that situated them, that defined their place in the program – a place where they could see that they had been active players, again and again, where they knew they were welcome and able to return, and where they had come to recognize that they not only belonged but also had the power to voice their own concerns and pursue their own personal agenda (Underwood et al., 2014, 2016).

Methods

In this article, we discuss how Projeto Clicar’s educators, viewing themselves as learners attempting to understand and support the meninas na rua who frequented Clicar, co-constructed zones of audacity together with these young learners, and how these zones of audacity developed collaboratively in the everyday context of Clicar, to set the stage for the development of the young people’s sense of personal voice, power, and self-placement in envisioning possible futures for themselves. We view this research as a cognitive ethnography (Hutchins, 1995) focused on one girl’s experience at Clicar and how it exemplifies young participants’ use of voice and their anticipatory appropriation in the development of problem-posing literacies (critical readings of the world and the word) that build on their own background knowledge.

The fieldwork on which this article is based took place over a period of fifteen years from 1998–2013. Elsewhere, we have described the variety of digital and hands-on activities and provided ethnographic accounts of the active learning that took place for the participants during this period at Clicar (see Underwood et al., 2014, 2016, 2017). We have discussed both a range of program activities and pedagogical strategies and explored the transformations that took place among the participants in these activities. For example, we have described how a socially isolated child, whose language was so delayed that he often had trouble communicating, eventually gained acceptance and confidence among others through his extraordinary proficiency at a digital memory game (Underwood et al., 2014). Similarly, we have observed children playing the Lion King game both individually and collaboratively and described how shared tools and artifacts mediated the acquisition of not just digital skills but also cognitive and social capabilities. In addition, we have focused on one child’s navigation – geographic, social, and cognitive – of his extreme life circumstances, using art as a tool to reflect on his own circumstances and experiences and re-envision a possible future in which he would possess the power to navigate the ambiguity and insecurity of his precarious world (Underwood et al., 2017).

Our methodological approach primarily involved participant observation, as we engaged directly in everyday activities with others in the social scene to find out how their actions and meanings came to be constructed and carried out over time (Dewalt & Dewalt, 2010; Pelto, 2013; Spradley, 1980). However, our research focused particularly and on our own participation in activities with the young people, and we explicitly avoided distancing ourselves as “objective” researchers. Our approach may thus be more accurately called observant participation, positing that it is largely through mutual participation that the audacity of learners’ voice comes directly into play. In observing the participants in this sociocultural scene, we employed research strategies that included: participating in and observing face-to-face and digital activities, learning conversational and meaning-making pragmatics appropriate to the setting, and conducting informal interviews (Briggs, 1986; Pelto, 2013).

We undertook this research to find ways to improve program strategies and activities for the benefit of those young people. We undertook this research largely to address the second focal point. In this cognitive ethnography of the children’s response to the programmatic efforts established and continually developed at Clicar, we observed the young people’s interactions in a variety of tasks and activities. We avoided any obtrusive measures, such as interviewing, filming or recording the children’s activities, to avoid any intrusion that might inhibit their spontaneous, enthusiastic participation in the program. We often selected particular tasks or activities – such as computer games, writing exercises, or art projects – for special observation, and we observed the children only while foregrounding our pedagogical engagement with the children in those activities as our first priority.

Together and separately, we collectively pursued this work as observant participants, making observations while we engaged in the activities with the children, and we subsequently cross-checked our various observations and interpretations with each other, in informal meetings that took place after the children had left for the day. The program directors, Dirce and Cecilia, kept notes of key events and circumstances, as well as folders containing the young people’s work (the young people had no place to keep these projects and products, so the program maintained an archive of their writings and artwork). These artifacts added to the range of data collected, but importantly, the educators never tried to frame program activities for the purpose of collecting data; the data always emerged from our observant participation. Together, these approaches grounded our research, enabling us to approach learning as something perceptible and observable within specific activities.

By describing these young people’s response to the informal learning activities at Clicar, their transformations in participation and voice, we attempt here to show how program activities mediated their social and cognitive development over time. In the process of carrying out this research, our collective work, both the work of program educators (Dirce and Cecilia) and visiting participant/researchers (Charles and Mara) took on a sustained qualitative approach that foregrounded the emerging intersubjectivities among educators, researchers, and the young people participating at Clicar. This approach enabled us to confront and address the potentially detrimental ethical dilemmas of qualitative research as we collectively took part in developing and examining inclusionary relations in the co-construction of social activity (Packer, 2011).

We open this discussion of zones of audacity with an ethnographic account of a situation that typified, if not epitomized, what we observed at Clicar. We offer here a detailed description of one girl’s exploration of various popular music websites and examine how that activity changed over time at her insistent provocation, as a prelude to discussing how this activity came to represent a zone of audacity for one young participant, and later for others, as the educators explicitly recognized and engaged the young learners’ voices in their encounter with popular music. In our approach to understanding these processes through observant participation, our research was molded into the culture of informal interaction at Clicar, bringing multiple voices into play such that both program educators (including the authors as researchers) and the young people who participated in the program became active learners in the learning process. The act of valuing the audacity of young learners’ voices became part and parcel of a vitalized and ethical stance toward both pedagogy and research engaging marginalized others. This research stance enabled us to capture how the young people’s experiences at Clicar enabled them to navigate their developmental transition from childhood to adolescence and thus to greater self-assurance and assertiveness, through activities which resonated strongly with their own backgrounds and interests while offering them the conceptual tools to understand and act on their present developmental moment in the larger context of a possible future that they envisioned for themselves.

Learners’ voices in context

When she first appeared at Projeto Clicar, Adriana (a pseudonym) was a lively, talkative girl, about ten or eleven years of age. She enjoyed playing computer games at Clicar and quickly became proficient enough to begin looking for other activities that the new technology offered. Not unexpectedly, she soon navigated toward the Internet. At a key moment of transition in her emerging adolescent consciousness, she was deeply interested in popular music, and she became especially captivated by music websites. In particular, she enjoyed playing the music of the Backstreet Boys, a well-known group at that time. Adriana’s intense interest in and exploration of these music websites occupied most of her time in the program. In the context of Clicar, Adriana’s personal interests and her considerable knowledge of the work of one popular contemporary band – her engagement in the open system of informal activity that Clicar made possible – became transformed over time into the development of her background knowledge to include and explore a new level of participation and exploration, not only in Clicar’s activities but also in the larger world in which she was struggling to make her way.

Capitalizing on her enjoyment, knowledge, and the desire to learn more of the world of popular music on the Internet, Adriana’s explorations made possible the development of problem-posing literacies (Freire, 1970; Rancière, 1991) that provided for a transformation of her sense of the world and her place in it. This process began to become evident one day while Charles was visiting Clicar. As he was walking around, observing children who were actively engaged both individually and in small groups, at a row of computers deeply focused on the varied activities that filled their screens, Adriana turned around from her computer and spoke to him.

“Os Estados Unidos!” [“The United States”]

Charles answered, “Qué?” [“What?”]

Charles had never seen Adriana before and Adriana had never seen Charles. But she had just heard that he was visiting the program that day, and she could not resist speaking to him for her own private reasons.

“Você é dos Estados Unidos!” [“You’re from the United States!”]

“Sim, sou dos Estados Unidos.” [“Yes. I’m from the United States”]

The girl grinned mischievously and without explanation, cryptically said, “Backstreet Boys!”

Charles smiled, recognizing the name of the then-popular band.

“Conheçe os Backstreet Boys?” [“You know the Backstreet Boys?”]

“Conheço,” Charles answered. [“I know.”]

“Eles estao dos Estados Unidos!” [“They’re from the United States”] Adriana said excitedly. “Lhes conheçe?” [“You know them?”].

Charles laughed and said, “Conheço a musica.” [“I know their music”].

At that point, Adriana began to sing one of the Backstreet Boys’ songs in almost perfect English. She sang through the whole song, her hands gesturing dramatically and her voice intoning the words and melody with heartfelt passion. The children around her turned their heads, smiling and swaying to the music.

“Ah, você fala inglês,” Charles said. [“Ah, you speak English.”]

“Não. Não falo,” she answered in Portuguese, then continued singing the song in English. Charles pulled up a chair and sat down next to her.

“Sim,” he said. “Você esta cantando em inglês.” [“Yes, you’re singing in English.”]

Adriana responded, “Não, só cantando Backstreet Boys.” [“No, I’m only singing the Backstreet Boys.”]

She began to sing another song by the Backstreet Boys, again in almost perfect English. Charles listened in amazement as she sang one song after another in succession, without hesitation, clearly enunciating the English lyrics and imitating the thin falsetto of the boy band’s voices. In all, she knew ten or more songs and sang them in perfectly, swaying back and forth happily as she sang.

“Where did you learn to sing like that?” Charles asked in Portuguese.

Adriana said, “So cantando Backstreet Boys. Adoro os Backstreet Boys.” [“I’m only singing the Backstreet Boys. I love the Backstreet Boys.”] She went on singing.

Charles said, “But you sing so well in English. How did you learn to sing the English words so well?”

“Adoro a música,” [“I love the music,”] said Adriana and continued to sing the lyrics in English.

“Fala bem,” Charles said to her [“You speak well”], but she answered, “Não falo, só canto.” [“I don’t speak it, I only sing.”]

“But how do you know so many words of so many songs?” Charles asked in Portuguese.

Adriana gestured at her computer. She turned and began typing on the keyboard. She quickly brought up the Backstreet Boys’ website and clicked an icon with a flourish.

“There!” she pointed in triumph.

From her computer came the song she had first been singing. As she turned up the volume, the tight harmonies of the boy band rang out through the space of Clicar, and Adriana sang along with them, her voice ranging from joy to heartache, in tune with the band’s harmonies and with the band’s soulful rendering of the lyrics. She switched from one song to another, and then to another, and she sang with the band in full voice, as if she were one of the group, sometimes taking the lead singer’s melody and sometimes singing the close harmonics of one of the other members of the band. Other children who were sitting around her looked over and smiled. Some of them hummed or sang softly along with some of the lyrics, but while they sang softly or hummed the melody to themselves, Adriana sang out loud, along with the band, perfectly phrasing all the English words of each song she played.

“Você fala inglês,” [“You speak English”] Charles said to Adriana when she paused for a moment to click on another title and change the song. Adriana shook her head.

“Não conheço inglês“[“I don’t know English,”] she said in Portuguese, and immediately began to sing again, almost perfectly articulating the words as they were sung by the band, elongating some syllables and contracting others in the deft colloquialisms of the song’s lyrics. Everyone in the room was now listening as Adriana accompanied the group. They hummed and bobbed their heads and their bodies swayed to the music. Adriana finished her song and clicked on another title.

“Espera, Adriana,” Charles said. “Vai as letras.” [“Go to the lyrics”]

“Que letras?” Adriana asked. [“What lyrics?”]

Charles pointed to an icon on the website with the word “Letras.”

“There,” he said in Portuguese. “Go there.”

First Adriana clicked on the title of the song she wanted to hear, and then clicked on “Letras.” As the Backstreet Boys and Adriana began singing, the words of the song appeared in English. Adriana stared at the words blankly. Charles waited until the second verse and then, as the band and Adriana sang the lyrics, Charles pointed at each word for the moment when it was intoned. Adriana continued singing, but now also followed Charles’s index finger as it pointed at each successive word. Adriana sang and followed the words as Charles pointed at them for a few minutes.

When the song finished, she looked away from the computer screen, over her shoulder at Charles. She looked at the screen again, and then again at Charles. Her eyes widened, and her mouth opened in a broad smile.

Charles said to her, “You are singing the English words to the song.”

Adriana looked at him in joyful disbelief. As a new song began, she looked at the screen carefully, following Charles’s finger as it pointed at each word that she and the band were singing. Her eyes lit up.

“Estou cantando em Inglês!” [“I’m singing in English”] she announced with proud amazement.

When Charles returned to Clicar after being away for a few days, he found the children engaged in a new activity, which Dirce and Cecilia and their team of educators had encouraged and worked with the young people to develop. On one side of the room, one of the computers was showing the Backstreet Boys’ website. Nearby, seven or eight children were gathered around a small round table, excitedly reviewing and discussing pieces of paper that were lying scattered on the table. As Charles approached, he saw that the children were pouring over the lyrics of songs by the Backstreet Boys. Some of the children were going back and forth between the computer and the table, as they checked and corrected, with the help of one of Clicar’s educators, each song’s lyrics. They talked excitedly to each other, sometimes shouting, all at the same time adding their comments and suggestions and expressions of surprise and fascination as the meaning of the lyrics emerged. Interestingly, Charles noticed, there were two sets of papers, some with the English lyrics and others with the same lyrics in Portuguese. The children were collaboratively building a set of full lyrics to each song, painstakingly turning the Backstreet Boys’ vocalizations into lines of English verse. At the same time, they were translating those lines into Portuguese lyrics with the use of both hardcopy and digital dictionaries. They also brought some of the educators into their activity as participants. The children directed the university students and Clicar directors, all of whom knew little or no English, to help look up or guess the meanings of specific words. Both the children and educators struggled with the songs’ dense rhetorical structures and puzzled over the colloquial grammatical structure and syntax of the English lyrics. As they all worked intently on creating the texts to the songs they had chosen, they all talked at the same time, commenting on each other’s renditions of the lyrics and spellings of the words in both languages. Some of them were functionally literate in Portuguese, however they were not fluent writers or readers even in their first language. None of the children knew any English.

Adriana herself knew the lyrics literally by heart, but her eyes lit up whenever she realized what they meant in Portuguese. She took on an active role as the authoritative expert in leading the activity, guiding the other young people at the table by pointing out sounds, significant words, and meanings. In this way, her participation transformed from what it had originally been, the leisurely individual amusement of a relatively passive listener, to what it soon became – the resolute pursuit of a collaborative translation activity by her as its leader, actively pondering the once-incomprehensible lyrics to discover meaning relevant to her adolescent development and to make meaning collectively with others. It was evident that Adriana saw this collective process of translating song lyrics as her activity. She had initiated it, beginning with her somewhat passive enjoyment of the Bay Street Boys’ website and by listening to their music. By engaging with others, including Charles and various educators and children at Clicar, “her” activity became transformed into her taking the lead for the activity with other Clicar participants, and by her vocal guidance, suggesting, recommending and explaining to others both how to translate specific English lyrics into Portuguese and how then to tweak the Portuguese translations into colloquial sociolinguistic conventions (often involving the use of São Paulo street slang) familiar not only to her but to the other children who were taking part as well. The other children involved entered the activity rather timidly, at first being willing to be told what to do, but soon were emboldened to use the digital tools they had to serve for word meanings. In time, they reveled in the process of arguing over specific translations of the lyrics, and began to look for, find, and suggest new shades of meaning in Portuguese for the English lyrics.

Throughout this activity, Adriana was observed both to work her way into the middle of the other kids involved in the activity, and to stand among them, as a teacher might, boldly pointing out words to the other children and asking leading questions, such as: “Qué significa isso?” [“What does that mean?”] or “Como podemos dizer isso melhor?” [“How can we say that better?”] In this way, she guided the other children through the process of translation. Using this process of collective but guided discovery as the activity spread, Adriana continued to lead the other students in their exploration to music and lyrics from other musical groups. The revelatory discovery of the meaning of Backstreet Boys’ music gave her the desire and the daring (the audacity!) to turn her immediate revelation into a longer-term discovery process.

With minimal guidance, Adriana profoundly transformed her participation in the musical activity, at first individually listening to the lyrics on the Backstreet Boys’ website while viewing the images that portrayed the singers singing their songs in various staged locations, and later, in anticipation of others’ potential interest in translating the rhythm and harmonies of the music into illuminating verbal meaning, entering into a collaborative cognitive process as a more active, agentive and experienced participant – transforming her role from receptive participation in the activity to actually shaping and guiding the activity. Viewed in the light of Rogoff’s (1996) concept of participatory appropriation, positing that changes in participation may be observed in terms of participants’ movement from relatively peripheral to more integral participation in specific activities, it is evident that Adriana’s participation in program activity had transformed as she began to appropriate her role in the activity, thus changing both her level of participation in the activity and radically changing the nature of her own authoritative participation in the activity. In fact, we would suggest that Adriana’s transformation may be even more deeply grasped in terms of the concept of anticipatory appropriation, in that her transformation came about as she began to anticipate both her own emerging sense of self and its implications for defining her place among others (see Underwood et al., 2017 for a more thorough discussion of anticipatory appropriation).

To fully comprehend the transformations that were taking place among these young people, it is important to remember that none of the young people spoke English when the activity began. They spoke variations of a street dialect of Portuguese. At first, the activity was a relatively passive auditory experience for Adriana. She had heard the songs over and over without having seen the text and had memorized both the precise melodic inflections of the singers’ voicings and the precise phonological elements of the song lyrics, without knowing what the lyrics meant. The process of pointing out to her the words, first in English and then in Portuguese, led to her revelation that she was actually singing in English. In the collaborative process of translating the English lyrics into Portuguese, she suddenly realized the semantic significance of the lyrics. This sociolinguistic transformation then fed back into her desire to translate more lyrics of more songs by more musical groups. Her role in the activity became more central, as she became eager to communicate what she was learning to others. In turn, the others became motivated to share the excitement of learning that Adriana’s leadership made possible, and then began themselves to play more authoritative roles in defining and refining the translations they all were collectively making.

Other activities emerged out of Adriana’s music-oriented translation activity. As many of the Clicar participants entered adolescence, they started to listen to rap and hip hop – genres which communicated realities that resonated much closer to their own hard lives. Mano Brown, a rapper from the outskirts of São Paulo, became a favorite for many of the young people who participated at Clicar, and when Charles gave the Clicar young people a book by the late rapper Tupac Shakur, with the lyrics to his rap oeuvre, they became more interested as well in North American rap and hip hop, and its expression of political activism and the insistence on identity in the face of social inequities.

The relationship between music and cross-language expression in this broader field of music opened up more ways for the educators and young people to interact together, as a continuation of the work that began with Adriana. The young people’s orientation to music and its implications were evident in a similar encounter, when a group of adolescent males were exploring hip hop websites. As they navigated one group’s website, they came across an icon that was unfamiliar to them. They called Charles over to their computer and asked him what it was about. Charles sat down with the group, and they clicked on the icon. It led to a video of Martin Luther King, Jr., giving his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Charles told them about King and the Civil Rights movement in the United States and the March on Washington in 1963. The young men expressed amazement as the camera moved from King and panned to the stone image of Abraham Lincoln and then over the thousands of people listening to King’s speech.

“Legal!” [“Cool!”] the young men shouted. They were amazed at how many people were gathered for the speech.

“Legal!” they said again as they listened to the tone and inflections of Kings’ voice.

“O que ele está dizendo?” [“What is he saying?”] the young men asked. Charles reset the video, and as the speech began again, Charles translated King’s words into Portuguese, and again and again, they shouted “Legal! Legal! Não posso acreditar!” [“Cool! Cool! I can’t believe it!”]

They asked about the Civil Rights movement, about Abraham Lincoln, about the history of slavery in the United States and about the idea of equality, and about inequality in the United States and throughout the world. Their fascination continued, especially as they began to see deeper meanings in the lyrics of North American rappers given the broader historical and current context that they were coming to understand. Over time, more and more Clicar participants began watching and listening to rap music and learning the lyrics, their fervor for the music and lyrics not only promoting their learning to read and write, but also leading to other literacies, new readings and understandings of broader sociopolitical contexts in which they came to see their own potential as historical actors, with the audacity to resist and hopefully transform both their own circumstances and those in the world at large.

Discussion

For Adriana, the exploration of the Backstreet Boys’ website was an activity at Clicar that allowed her to “play” with the communicative conventions (Gumperz, 1982) of a popular language resonant with her own emerging adolescence. Her remarkable recall of many of the band’s lyrics in a language that was not her own was a way of playing with speech at the limits of her understanding. But her language play was by no means unconnected with her own experience of transformation. The activity brought her into a realm where she was able to engage with language in a way that she could at the same time grapple with her own understandings and expanding awareness of the new cognitive sphere and range of adolescent interpersonal relationships she was navigating, especially as that world was transforming along with her own transition into adolescence.

This ethnographic example illustrates the process that takes place in the collective development of shared expectations through improvised joint activity guided by educators attuned to the voices of learners – their audacity, or emerging self-assurance and boldness, both in shaping the interactive activity itself and in transforming the nature of their participation in the activity over time. Importantly, we are by no means presuming to suggest that these concepts are intended to replace Vygotsky and Rogoff’s conceptualizations; instead, we pose them as concepts that further illuminate the cognitive processes that Vygotsky and Rogoff have posited. We are suggesting that while the concepts of the zone of proximal development and participatory appropriation designate what is taking place, the ideas of zones of audacity and anticipatory appropriation show how such development and cognitive transformation takes place, and thus in more vivid terms, how learning can be enabled and supported among learners, especially historically marginalized learners, through recognizing and foregrounding their voices and actions.

We posit the idea of zones of audacity to emphasize the import of the concept of learners’ voices for understanding children’s learning and development through playful activity. Freire (1970) urged the critical importance of problem-posing pedagogies that build on learners’ background knowledge, and Freinet (1993) and Rancière (1991) have emphasized the importance of children’s learning through play. Cole (1996, 2006) and Vásquez (2003) advanced this approach through the development of out-of-school program activities providing an institutionalized activity system for sustained learning through play. Stetsenko (2015) has further documented children’s emergence as agentive actors through the serious work of play in coauthoring joint activity as self-determining, responsive persons engaged in the process of making sense of the world around them. The focus on learners’ voices further provides a conceptual framework for observing and interpreting this communicative process by combining Vygotsky’s (1978) approach to the social context of learning through lived experience with Bakhtin’s (1981) approach to the understanding of power and mutual answerability in the concrete communicative experience of learning. More specifically, the concept of learners’ voices enables us to focus on the “serious work” of young people in learning to challenge their experience of displacement in the world and begin to articulate and assert their own place in a possible world they envision for themselves (Stetsenko, 2015).

As we have seen in Adriana’s case, a zone of audacity may begin in the activity of a single individual (although of course even individual activity – a child listening to music – implies her interaction with a broader social world), if it takes place in the context of an alternative space that foregrounds the expression of learners’ voices. In this context at Clicar, Adriana’s individual activity soon transformed into a sustained joint activity in which Adriana and others were enabled to define the situation for themselves and set their own agenda, based on their own emerging interests and concerns. The alternative space of Clicar, set apart from the hazards of the street that the young people faced every day, enabled them to vocalize and pursue their interests and concerns boldly, to resist their usual experience of neglect and silencing, and to insist on setting their own path to knowledge construction and to personal and collective authenticity.

While the concept of the zone of proximal development allows us to understand how in this joint activity the young people are able to figure out tasks and strategies that they could not have figured out on their own, the idea of zones of audacity enables us to specifically observe how learners’ voices are encouraged (literally allowed to exercise their courage) and are listened to.In turn, it enables us to view how those learners become emboldened to play out their interests and concerns as they anticipate and formulate concrete projects and products in the serious work of play. We believe that the idea of zones of audacity is especially resonant in collaborative activities among socially excluded young people, whereby they resist their usual experience of displacement, and both assert their place in the world around them and insist on a process in which others take them seriously and listen to what they have to say. Alternative spaces (we might call them alternative worlds) like Clicar establish the frame in which zones of audacity can take place.

Conclusion

In Vygotsky’s view, historical analysis enables us to document the transformations that take place in the context of particular historically-based sociocultural circumstances. By observing the interactional processes and pedagogical strategies designed and adapted by educators in programs like Projeto Clicar, we are able to discern what encourages and supports learning – i.e., learners’ changing participation in program activities over time (Rogoff, 1996), as illustrated by Adriana’s transformation from a relatively passive enjoyment of popular songs to her active engagement in translating their significance, both for herself and others. Similarly, by focusing on learners’ voices we are able to tangibly observe the transformations in learners’ participation in the sociocultural activities in the context of the conditions established by program educators in collaboration with program participants. Importantly, the distributed cognition that takes place under these conditions is a reciprocal process, involving the play of voices among both educators and the young people with whom they are working. Optimally in programs like Clicar, both the young people for whom (and with whom) the program is designed and implemented and the educators who guide program activities become learners together, commingling their voices in an ongoing collaborative dialogue that builds mutual understandings and complementary perspectives in their joint activity.

At Clicar, this expansive process of distributed cognition did not take place without the careful planning, preparation, and performance of all involved, both adult educators and young participants, in the production of a sociocultural framework open to the integrative play of diverse, dissonant and disorderly voices, boisterously engaged in the collaborative definition and re-definition of the third space (Gutiérrez, 2008) of Clicar as social scene – re-envisioning both the situated learning activity itself and the complex circumstances in which the meninas na rua found themselves. Clicar represented a third space in the sense that it offered a time and place that was designed and designated specifically for them, a space where the pervasive social exclusion that they encountered daily was for a few hours suspended (Gutiérrez, 2008). It was a space where the children as they entered were daily observed to set aside the hardened masks of street toughness they usually presented and, for a few hours each day, act like children. Yet in some ways, the concept of the “third space” inadequately conveys the situation at Clicar, in that the concept, as generally used, presumes in the first place a “home world” (the relatively sheltered world of parents, shelter, and food) and a secondary “institutional world” (the often prescriptive world of school and other institutions associated with social assistance and control). For these children, that first space did not exist, or was pieced together situationally and precariously from one day to the next, and the second space was, for almost all of these young people, a world from which they were excluded, with the occasional exception of local shelters where they could potentially ask for food or a place to spend the night.

That is, the young people at Clicar, viewed Clicar not as a classroom or learning environment, but as a social scene (Silver & Clark, 2016) which (given the educators’ explicit adherence to a Freirean pedagogy of freedom) in the young people’s view was simply an alternative space unlike anything else they knew, a zone of activity which in their view existed for the expansive making of meaning for themselves and with each other. The untrammeled enactment of this pedagogical approach at Clicar was both the educators’ primary concern and their explicit objective, which recognized, accepted and encouraged the audacity of the meninas na rua who attended the program; it expanded their sense of belonging in the alternative space of Clicar and in this way enabled the often unruly, disruptive projection of their voices – their audacity – as an act of self-placement, overtly claiming their rightful place as active, authoritative historical actors both within the program and in the larger world beyond.

Acknowledgments

The authors wish especially to thank Marcos Matsukuma and Lara Moammar for their key contributions to our research and this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. We explicitly use the term learners’ to be inclusive of both the young people and the educators and researchers working with the young people. While this article is focused mainly on the learning of the young people at Projeto Clicar, we include ourselves as learners as well.

2. We follow the work of Bakal & Vásquez Reyes (in press) and avoid italicizing Portuguese words as a means of placing these on equal footing with English language terms and countering the tendency to exoticize non-English languages. We follow their practice of italicizing words for emphasis when new key constructs or terms (in Portuguese and English) are introduced for the first time in the manuscript.

3. At the risk of leaving out important contributors to the body of work focused on university-community engagement, please see Underwood et al. (2021) for a detailed description of the University-Community Links (UC Links) network and the decades of research and practice contributed by university and community partners.