Black lives matter: efeitos e sentidos da teoria racial crítica na sala de aula de língua inglesa da escola pública

Abstract

According to Anya (2017), research that aligns race and racism with English Language Teaching are still rare. Thus, this master’s research, which is inserted in the area of Applied Linguistics (AL), aims to investigate and understand the effects and meanings emerged from the use of Critical Racial Theory in an English-language classroom of a public school, in the light of the principles and procedures of Discourse Analysis (DA) (PECHEUX, 1999; ORLANDI, 2013). For this, racialized teaching materials, which are activities based on the Critical Racial Theory, were produced and applied in the participating classroom. This study is configured as a qualitative research linked to a case study done in a classroom. The corpus generated during the four months of research consisted of interviews, questionnaires, class recordings, observations and research notes. Methods of DA were used as analytical procedures, specially the notions of subject, identification, memory, discursive memory and discursive resonances (SERRANI, 2005). From the analysis of the generated corpus, the effects and meanings of approaching race and racism were apprehended during the teaching of English language. The results point to four possible effects and meanings: the strangeness regarding the presence of black people in the activities; the English language becoming a presence in the classroom; the marks of slavery in students' discursive memory; and the place of racism in the classroom. Thus, we argue that talking about race and racism in the EL classroom, in addition to being an important method of combating racism in society acts as a mechanism for redefining the place and role of blacks in social and discursive relations.