Entre águas, peneiras e baquaras : saberes docentes interculturais e contracoloniais em licenciaturas indígenas na FAINDI/UNEMAT, Brasil e na UPN, México

Abstract

This thesis investigates the knowledge and learning of teachers known as baquaras in the Tupi language. This knowledge is part of the professional development of teachers who are training teachers in the Bachelor's Degree in Intercultural Pedagogy at FAINDI/UNEMAT in Barra do Bugres, Mato Grosso, and in the Bachelor's Degree in Indigenous Education at the Universidad Pedagogíca Nacional in Mexico City. The research was concerned with reflecting on how educational and professional experiences are part of the development and resignification of knowledge and learning in a context marked by colonial legacies in contrasts presented by indigenous movements in Brazil and Mexico that call on universities to rethink their practices, times and spaces in light of an Intercultural, Indianized and Counter-Colonial Education. The corpus of the research is composed of narratives from 13 teachers from these courses, in which the choice of these participants is justified by their experience in intercultural educational contexts and by their willingness to share their lives. As a narrative researcher, I understand that narratives compose meanings, and teaching and education are manifestations of these experiences in and with the world. The notion of experience is based on John Dewey, based on the resignifications carried out by Clandinin and Connelly (2015), who defend narrative research as a method and phenomenon. This perspective encompasses the three-dimensionality of narrative inquiry in which experiences occur in different times, places, and social relationships. I call “narrative confluences” the paths taken within the research, which were permeated by relational craftsmanship based on the conception of the indigenous author Longhini (2022), Freire (2013), and Monteiro (2017), who understand teaching from human relationships as the place of affection, trust, sensitive listening, respect for unique times and places, manifestations of teaching in the contexts under study. Becoming a teacher in this space is part of a movement of re-existence, disobedience and insurgency by students and teachers who train other indigenous and non-indigenous teachers by counter-colonizing within these universities. The narrative research also mobilized epistemological insurgencies by articulating its assumptions to indigenous and black authors about the processes of coloniality-counter colonization and how these processes affect the construction of professional teaching knowledge. I understand this body-thesis based on Paulo Freire, Silvia Cusicanqui, Rodolfo Kucsh, feeding the idea that we are living bodies on a living Earth announced by Aitlon Krenak. Knowledge and learning occur within a corporeal-intercultural-environmental-spiritual historical perspective in which the teaching profession results in a tangle of complex threads amidst institutional challenges and conflicts, with ethical-political commitment, ethnic and class self-recognition experienced by teachers. These professionals are in a permanent process of re-elaborating their knowledge, constituting Indianized intercultural epistemologies mediated by the ancestral knowledge of students and of themselves that permeate their entire training. These are learnings and knowledge developed with the heart, and therefore, there are permanent processes of reinvention of self that intertwine the plots of professional teacher development in collective movements and permanent struggle based on the singularity of the lived and narrated experience.