Letramento Racial Crítico e a interrupção de silêncios na formação de professoras/es de línguas: o que se esconde quando falo de raça?

Abstract

In this study, I aimed to discuss the silences that emerged from a critical racial literacy experience at a public university in a city of Goiás. My specific objectives are: a) to understand and denounce how the silence about race and racism has been embedded in the Brazilian society; and b) to problematize the perceptions of race and racism of the participants who took part in the critical racial literacy experience in question. This work is situated within the research line of Language and Social Practices, under the research project led by Prof. Dr. Barbra do Rosário Sabota Silva, titled Critical, Decolonial, and Posthumanist Perspectives in Language Education and Teacher Education. It is based on a critical decolonial perspective, which supports the understanding that scientific inquirythat is valuable to society is the one that challenges colonial structures, thereby subverting the logic of modernity that intends to homogenize existence. I employ efforts toward identifying, critiquing, resisting, and proposing strategies to confront the dichotomies imposed by coloniality. In order to carry this study, I devised a pedagogic route of four lessons, which were taught in a course of applied linguistics from a Portuguese and English language teaching undergraduate program. The proposal for the lessons was grounded on the principles of critical racial literacy. According to Aparecida de Jesus Ferreira (2015), this framework involves examining our own understandings of how race and racism are addressed in our daily lives and how they affect our social identities. In addition to the classes, this work includes as materials autobiographical narratives authored by the students, recorded individual conversations held after the course, as well as the researcher’s reflexive journal and other activities done in class. Throughout this thesis, I address language teacher education as a strategic locus for confronting racism in our society. When I ask myself what is hidden when I speak about race, I observe that silences emerge from the historical fiction of the formation of Fatherland Brazil, and that coloniality internalizes these silencing structures, making it difficult to engage in conversations about our raciality. From the students’ perceptions of their own raciality, I discuss the silences that emerged, which here I characterize as limbic and epistemic, and I expatiate on the relations between the systemic erasure of non-legitimized epistemologies by coloniality and how the divide between body and knowledge perpetuates oppressive hierarchies. This study contributes to stress the need for teacher education programs to value lived experiences so as to disrupt silences that sustain racism.