This paper presents the methodology used by the courses offered by the Center for Continued Education, Institute for Language Studies, UNICAMP, to basic school education teachers who work in public schools in Brazil. The courses use the freeware environment for distance learning TelEduc as a space for different practices with reading and writing as well as a space for interaction between the in-service teachers and the teacher educators aiming at the reflection about educational practice in the area of Language and Literacy. Amidst a complex net of interaction and learning, we chose to analyse what is done in this context regarding the work with and about writing in some extracts from one of the courses. With this focus in mind, we take into account the pre-conceived ideas that the course participants have about distance learning, the way they interpret/use the spaces of communication provided by the environment, the relations they establish among non-digital and digital textual genres and also genres which they learn about/use in this environment, the way they get involved in the community that is created during the course and the social relationships they build. The results indicate that the there is a qualitative growth of the relation participant/reading-writing relation in the courses and that the in-service teachers place themselves - within the proposed activities/tasks - as readers/writers in the interactions which are done almost exclusively by means of writing. The extracts analysed show that reading and writing using the environment tools require understanding/interpreting these genres/support even for those who are not very familiar with technology. For them, the course was also a means to get an introduction to Digital Literacy in an informal, situated and contextualized way.
Teacher education; readind and writing; distance education; digital textual genres