Education, black identity, and teacher education: a look upon the black body and hair

Abstract

This article discusses the specificities and possible relations between education, culture, black identity, and teacher education, approaching them from the perspective of corporeity and aesthetics. For that, the text introduces the need to articulate education and non-education processes, to insert new themes and discussions into the field of teacher education. Following on the considerations made by the author in her doctoral thesis, the representations and notions about the black body and hair constructed inside and outside school are discussed, based on memories and testimonies of black men and women interviewed during an ethnographic study carried out in ethnic beauty shops in Belo Horizonte. For those people, the experience with the black body and hair is not restricted to the family environment, friendships, militancy or love life. The school appears in several testimonies as an important space in which the tense process of construction of the black identity also takes place. Sadly, the school is not often remembered as an institution where black people and their aesthetic standards are viewed positively. The appreciation of this context reveals that the body, as a support for the construction of the black identity, still has to be taken up as a theme of choice by the educational field, particularly in the studies on teacher education and ethnic-cultural diversity. It also shows that, when considering such diversity, this field of study will have to open itself to the dialogue with other spaces where black people also construct their identity, spaces such as beauty shops, many times regarded as unconventional in the field of education.