Letramento e educação escolar indígena: análise de uma experiência descolonial

Abstract

Many challenges are faced, daily, by the Brazilian indigenous communities. In the context of school education, in particular, one of the major problems is the interference of the hegemonic curriculum - reproduced widely among educational institutions throughout the country - in the pedagogical practices of indigenous teachers and students. Contrary to homogeneity and curricular inflexibility, these teachers try hard to build a specific, differentiated, intercultural, bilingual/multilingual and community education into the schools in which they work, which is in accordance with the beliefs and customs of their group and also that meets their real needs. Among the alternatives that fit this reality, we suggest the literacy projects (KLEIMAN, 2000), understood in this research as a didactic device that considers social practice as the organizing axis of teaching. Based on the Applied Linguistics, transgressive area in theory and disciplinarity (PENNYCOOK, 2006), this study aims, with a qualitative-interpretative nature and an ethnographic bias, to investigate the impacts of a collaborative literacy project in a public school of the Amarelão, a local traditional community constituted, ethnically, by the Potiguara. To do so, we take as the object of analysis the practices of reading, writing and speech employed in the aforementioned school. As a theoretical support, we rely mainly on Literature Studies (GEE, 1998; BARTON and HAMILTON, 2000; STREET, 1984; JANKS, 2010; KLEIMAN, 1995; OLIVEIRA, TINOCO and SANTOS, 2014); in Critical Pedagogy (MCLAREN, 2005; GIROUX, 2003; APPLE, 1993; FREIRE, 1967), focusing on Red Pedagogy (GRANDE, 2004); and in Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies (BHABHA, 1998; WOODWARD, 2005; SAID, 1990; SPIVAK, 2010; WEEDON, 2004; HALL, 2005). The data generated during the actions allow us to affirm that the literacy projects, in harmony with the official documents that currently govern indigenous school education, such as the National Curriculum Framework for Indigenous Schools, constitute a social practice that, instead of reproducing silences, allow the indigenous students to act with/on/for their culture.