Narratives of a non-experience: knowledge constructed in the anti-racist struggle in art teaching
afro-Brazilian culture; art teaching; decolonial thinking; interculturality; anti-racist education
Considering Law nº 10.639/03, which includes in the official curriculum of the National Education Network the mandatory theme "Afro-Brazilian History and Culture", the work intends to outline paths for the construction of a decolonial pedagogy in arts, which ensures positive and aggregators representations of Afro-Brazilians and that focuses on education based on respect for diversity. Through the principles of pretagogia (Sandra Haydéé Petit, 2015 and Geranilde Costa e Silva, 2013), cantar-dançar-batucar (Ligiéro, 2011), and fundamentals of African philosophy in the light of Adilbênia Freire Machado (2014) and Eduardo Oliveira (2007), we propose the investigation of a specific lexicon of Brazilian cultural performances that originates from and influences African traditions, with a view to providing students with an awareness of a corponegritude, Jonas Sales, 2015. The initial idea of this research was to create a group of practical-critical activities at school to experience jongo and funk and outline debates that could awaken students' critical thinking to issues of racism and prejudice. By establishing a rapprochement between these two expressions, we intended to stimulate the interest of students – and, by extension, of the entire school community – so that the student body could demystify artistic-cultural aspects of African matrices (until today seen from a negative perspective) very present in the daily life of the student body itself, in such a way that, by recognizing these aspects, students could re-signify and value – often their own – blackness. However, due to structural and religious racism, this project did not happen and the course of this research underwent some modifications. This work then reports three narratives of experiences that took place in the classroom, in the teaching of Art, which did not happen as expected because of discrimination and prejudice that were very deep-rooted in society against Afro-Brazilian traditions. Reports of experiences that I call non-experiences. We therefore propose decolonial and intercultural thinking as a way out of these social problems and to outline strategies for a pedagogical praxis that is fairer, plural and, above all, anti-racist.