Cidadania e multiculturalismo: a Lei 10.639/03 no contexto das bibliotecas das escolas municipais de Belo Horizonte

Abstract

This dissertation examines the impact of the Law 10.639/03 and of the National Curricular Guidelines for the Education of Ethnic-Racial Relations and for the Teaching of History and Afro-Brazilian and African Cultures in the context of municipal school libraries of Belo Horizonte. The Law 10.639/03 altered devices of the Guidelines and Bases Law of National Education (LDB/1996) and made compulsory the teaching of African History and Afro-Brazilian culture in all schools of elementary and secondary education in Brazil. We tried to recover some of these concepts and ideas in the debate about the Law and its related Curricular Guidelines. We also tried to contextualize the setting of passage of this Law, noting the challenges that it indicates to the State and to the civil society by giving visibility to issues such as anti-racist education, cultural pluralism and multiculturalism, and put on agenda the discussion of the role of the State in shaping citizenship. This work assumed that the school library in the municipal schools of Belo Horizonte is an important educational area therefore presents itself as a privileged locus for the analysis of the Law 10.639/03 reception, with regard to the discussion of citizenship, multiculturalism and cultural plurality. The choice to analyse municipal school libraries was due to the particularities of municipal education proposal from Belo Horizonte. The Plural School proposal, in force since 1994, promotes principles related to inclusion and respect for cultural plurality. In addition, there is in the city a program that seeks to "revitalize" municipal school libraries. So, we tried to analyse how the Law 10.639/03 and the Curricular Guidelines were interpreted and operationalized in this context. By the nature of this research problem and the specific nature of the organization of municipal school libraries this survey was developed in three stages: in the first documents related to Law 10.639/03 were collected and analysed, there were also interviews with the coordinator of the Ethnic-Racial and Gender Relations and the former coordinator of the Center for the Coordination of Libraries; in the second stage, we attempted to map if the librarians of the libraries-pole knew the Law 10.639/03 and what were their views about it; in the third, we sought to identify and analyse the practices and the political and educational options for a school library in relation to the Law 10.639/03. In the survey, we confirmed the primary idea that the educational program in the city of Belo Horizonte has aspects in common with the discussion of the Law 10.639/03, offering a priviledged environment for the Law implementation. It was felt that the speeches and actions in the municipal political-administrative sphere are in accordance with the National Guidelines conceptions, but that the discussion on the topic of the law raises sensitivity among librarians of the network in different ways. Personal characteristics such as racial self-identification and interest in the topic interfere with how they handle the issue of the Law. Librarians who participated in this research, although they knew the law and acknowledged its importance, had very different opinions about the role of the library in implementation of this Law. The administrative structure of the city of Belo Horizonte helps to create space for discussion of the Law 10.639/03, but the subjects are appropriating these spaces for multiple ways.