A didatização do texto literário para o ensino-aprendizagem do português como língua materna: Os Lusíadas como proposta didática por Sebastião da Gama

The didacticization of the literary text for the teaching-learning of Portuguese as mother tongue : Os Lusíadas as a didactic proposal for Sebastião da Gama · From the perspective of the literary text didacticization for the teaching of Portuguese as mother tongue, this paper examines the pedagogical strategies applied by Sebastião da Gama (1924-1952), a poet who worked as a teacher in the mid-twentieth century, to structure learning sessions based on the activity of collaborative reading and historical-linguistic interpretation of the Camonian work Os Lusíadas, with a dialogic and interactive approach to encourage, in accordance with the Activism principles, the dynamic participation of students. The methodology used is described in Diário (1958), a posthumous work that reports his teaching experience during the school years 1948-1949 and 1949-1950 at the Veiga Beirão, a technical school in Lisbon, which was recently translated in Italian (2021). Starting from the adapted form of Os Lusíadas by Simões Müller (1909-1989) – author of literary texts belonging to the infantile-juvenile genre –, present in the school manual Leituras (1948) adopted at the Veiga Beirão, the poet puts into action, through the expressive reading and the students’ participative reflections, learning sessions to stimulate, on the one hand, the understanding of the main themes faced by Camões and, on the other hand, the development of the target audience’s textual competence, clarifying also technical terms, such as ‘poem’ and ‘epic’.