The “Convention on the Rights of the Child” (UNICEF, 1989) establishes in Articles 29 and 30 that every child has the right to learn and maintain the language and culture of their family. In this context, the teaching of Portuguese as a heritage language plays an essential role in preserving cultural identity, promoting social inclusion, and safeguarding the linguistic rights of families. The Portuguese Early Literacy Course developed by Instituto Guimarães Rosa (IGR) Helsinki exemplifies this approach by offering multilingual children the opportunity to learn the language of their ancestors in an institutional, inclusive, and welcoming environment. Based on the “social justice lens” proposed by Ortega (2020), we understand that ensuring equitable access to the languages surrounding a speaker necessarily includes the possibility of becoming literate in their heritage language, and not solely in the language of instruction used in school. This contributes, among other aspects, to the institutionalization of the heritage language within the school environment and to its consequent “demarginalization.” The IGR Helsinki initiative thus emerges as an important tool for promoting equitable access to Portuguese language education within the Finnish educational context. Furthermore, the course’s pedagogical approach aligns with Paulo Freire’s perspective (1974), which conceives education as an act of liberation—one that enables children to recognize their own histories and their potential as social agents who will be able to rely on their heritage language to act in diverse contexts in the future. In this presentation, we will share the full process of implementing the course and the pedagogical tools used in the development of the instructional materials. In this presentation, we will share the full process of implementing the course and the pedagogical tools used in the development of the instructional materials, which were collected from two digital manuals provided online by the Brazilian Education Ministry (Martins et al., 2022; MEC, 2022). Since the materials were created aiming at the teaching of a mother tongue, the novelty of this work relies on the materials' adaptation to the context of heritage language teaching. In addition, feedback collected from parents at the end of the course will be discussed in order to assess the impact of the lessons on the students’ linguistic development, the strengthening of their heritage identity, and the legitimization of Portuguese as a language of instruction and knowledge acquisition.

Freire, P. (1974). Pedagogia do Oprimido. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra. Martins, Bruno et al. (2022). Manual do Aluno [recurso eletrônico]. Brasília: Secretaria de Alfabetização, Ministério da Educação (SEALF/MEC). (https://alfabetizacao.mec.gov.br/images/pdf/manual_do_aluno_PBA.pdf) MEC, 2022. Práticas de alfabetização (https://alfabetizacao.mec.gov.br/images/pdf/abecedario_praticas_de_alfabetizacao_082022.pdf ). UNICEF (1989). Convention on the Rights of the Child (https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/convention-text) Accessed on 5.1.2026. Ortega, L. (2020). The study of heritage language development from a bilingualism and social justice perspective. Language Learning, 70, 15-53.