The focus of this study is the Portuguese language teaching practice under macro and micro perspectives with everyday school challenges at a public school located in a poor community in Zona Oeste, Rio de Janeiro. The purpose consists in generating understandings about some questions which emerged from classroom interactions and resulted in loggerheads and resistance against pedagogical labor, affecting the teaching-learning process in that context. The discussion and reflections were oriented by exploratory potential-like literacy activities mainly performed by two 8th grade classes during the year 2014. Adopting a Transgressive Applied Linguistics perspective and being aligned to propositions that question the traditional scientific methods, this study suggests the decoloniality of our practices as researchers, being guided by autoethnographic and ethnographic views. The proposal is based upon Exploratory Practice, as a pedagogical process focus, seeking to prioritize the quality of life in the classroom with active participation of all involved. Accommodating that proposal, I defend the idea of a Portuguese Language teaching focusing an interpretative reaction notion during literacy practices and a more conscious attitude from teachers towards language as praxis. Data is composed of a series of pedagogical sequences in classroom activities, as well as institutional information, accounts, reports, interviews and writings from my diary and field notes, which have been generated since my insertion in the municipal teaching system in 2013. The first accomplished activities pointed out to the traditional teaching models as the ones legitimated to be used in the PL classes and suggested the ratification of my role as a teacher from the students authorization. With the exploratory activities, the students perceptions about oneself and the other in the school context indicated denaturing of preconcepts and beliefs, enhancing the interrelations in the classroom. The achieved understandings collaborated with the apprehension of the other as someone potentially equal, emphasizing alterity as a necessary and permanent exercise to social and pedagogical practices. There was a change in the attitude towards the legitimating of PL, underlying the comprehension that the use of language and the literacy activities are present in everyday actions. The existence in that school context demanded a kind of research which questioned the very way of researching, especially by enabling the different knowledge carried by the students and their local histories to be understood as episteme, and creating visibility to the different worlds and cultures in contact at school space as possible worlds under construction. In this respect, the idealization of a school which could respond to all the needs of the less privileged classes is replaced by the perception that thinking about a possible school according to the local specificities turns out to be a more coherent and engaged proposal to those other possible worlds and actors towards the creation of contingent, procedural and continuing intelligibilities.