Rebuilding ties in the school community as a way to fight against violence and racism

Abstract

This article presents excerpts from a field study involving the transdisciplinary and African-referenced work, linked with Critical Theory, of grad students, professionals and art educators in a public school located in a low-income, peripheral neighborhood of Sao Paulo, over a period of three years, as part of a broader study conducted in other schools in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Paraiba. The proposition of presenting the several scopes of the research aims at showing the link between different types of intervention in three spheres: shared teaching, teacher training and in-depth ethnic-racial debate in the operative group. On the one hand, we aimed at reflecting on the violent acts committed in the daily school life and ways to fight it by means of dialogical and emancipatory education. On the other hand, the main obstacles found to the training of teachers were highlighted, considering the ambiguity of practices and discourses in the school community in the face of the violence and racism that underly Brazilian society. We chose a theoretical methodological approach lined up with a communitarian and African diasporic perspective combined with a decolonial and emancipatory ethnographic view of the educational institution. Based on that multifaceted approach, we observed a fertile field to reforge the ties that were broken in the school community and contribute to dive deep into antiracist education. That transdisciplinary performance concomitantly allowed the visibility of African diasporic knowledge, according to Law nº 10.639/2003, which emends LDB (Law of Guidelines and Bases) in a dynamic way that is attentive to the students’ social and cultural reality.