A criança Indígena na escola urbana: um desafio intercultural

Abstract

This work aims at verifying how the urban public school system in Manaus deals with indigenous students as well as at understanding how the image of the Indian present in the school practices are received by these students. In order to achieve this objective, the work approaches the urban public school examining some of the contradictions that show up when it deals with the culture of the subjects that are part of it, namely the urban Indians belonging to the Sateré-Mawé ethnic group dwelling in Manaus. It also presents analysis on the challenges that the indigenous children face and on how this situation can be noticed throughout the practices and discourses in the urban school context. This research is based on theoretical presuppositions anchored in the notions of culture, cultural diversity, multiculturalism, interculturalism, and their relation with the teaching practice. The methodology through which the objective is sought stems from a qualitative approach to point out research alternatives that can respond to the guiding questions of the research. It makes use of semistructured interviews with the students, the teachers, the pedagogue, and the director in a public school to capture the meanings present in their discourses. In addition, as an ethnographic research, this work starts from the observation of the subjects in their pedagogic relations, more specifically the indigenous children, and of the feelings they have towards a world so culturally different from theirs. To do so, it has been used the technique of collective interview using the child story The skunk that could not smile in order to get 10-to-17-year-old fourth graders involved in the approach on differences, similarities and alterity, as well as in showing their way of making sense of the world. Information on the indigenous culture/urban school culture relation and among the different subjects in the school arena (indigenous and nonindigenous teachers and students), mediated by different cultures, allows us to reflect on the so-called plural school, a school that indeed makes these plural theoretical concept invisible in its day-by-day practices. The work ends with the proposal of educational, social and cultural adjustments in the existent school system as a way to reduce discrimination and to make of the differences present in diversity the meaning of individual and collective subject construction, using as a reference the Political and Pedagogical Plan of the school. The collective construction and execution of the Plan must be the possibility of reflecting on the practices, taking into account the possible intercultural perspective in each school context, starting from the conflict posed by the differences as an opportunity for a fairer society.