Entre fios: desfazendo nós de colonialidade e costurando alianças antirracistas na educação linguística

Abstract

This research addresses the relationship between whiteness, coloniality, and language education, how these three areas intertwine, and their importance in the education of language teachers. The aim of the research was to investigate the relevance of two different environments for the education of language educators at different stages of their preparation, with the aim of promoting racial literacy among teachers (Ferreira, 2015; Moreira, 2024) and providing/deepening the foundations for an engaged pedagogy (hooks, 2017, 2020) that recognizes whiteness as a socio-historical construction (Bento, 2022; Schucman; Conceição, 2023), understands race as an analytical and political category that is indispensable for thinking about a less unequal society, and that has the decolonial perspective as a possibility for teaching praxis. The focus of the research is on the process of self-reflection that enables us to identify the colonialities that constitute us, as well as on the process of understanding our own racialization within the society in which we live and how it affects our understanding of the world. To develop the research, an undergraduate course was offered that lasted one semester, aimed at pre-service teachers of different languages; and an extension course that lasted one academic year, involving pre-service and in-service teachers. The reflection on the relevance of these spaces used questionnaires, short narratives and a field diary by the researcher. In addition, an interview with the coordinator and supervisor of the activities helped to contextualize and reflect on the importance of proposing these educational paths. Based on the data raised in these two contexts, it is possible to say that, despite Laws 10.639/2003 and 11.645/2008, which establish the mandatory teaching of indigenous and Afro-Brazilian history and culture throughout the school curriculum – an action that could contribute to our ethnic-racial awareness and understanding of the historical construction of inequalities –, we continue to educate teachers ready to tell history solely from a European and white-centered perspective, maintaining the silencing and erasure of stories and cultures related to non-white people. The two proposals made appear, therefore, as alternatives to try to make up for our historical failure to educate language educators who are attentive to the society that constitutes us. Racism in Brazil is structural, but the structure is made up of people; hence the importance to understand how the myth of racial democracy (Gonzalez, 2020; Munanga, 2020; Sales, 2023) was constructed and to understand ourselves racially within our society. This thesis is also an invitation to an anti-racist alliance.