Povo Parintintin e seus saberes sobre o céu: as perspectivas dos conhecedores tradicionais e dos educadores

Abstract

This research is a master's dissertation produced under the Postgraduate Program in Teaching of Sciences and Humanities - PPGECH between 2018 and 2020 that sought to investigate the Parintintin people and their knowledge about the sky. The heaven-earth link goes far beyond academic activity. The conception of the universe itself is relative. Traditional peoples, for example, maintain their relations with nature and consequently have their ways of interpreting and explaining the world. Cultural astronomy is a relatively recent area of study that attempts to understand sky-earth relationships through an anthropological look at different cultures. In this context, from a field research, this research aimed to understand the space occupied by knowledge about the skies in the daily lives of the Parintintin people and the state school inserted in the village Traíra. For theoretical foundation we carry out reflections on cultures, curriculum and cultural astronomy. Also, we mapped cultural astronomy in educational research, through a literature review on means of disseminating education in astronomy. Among 793 investigated publications, 14 somehow address the skies of indigenous groups and among these, only 4 have indigenous skies as their central theme. Also, none of them specifically investigates indigenous school curriculum. In addition to a closer relationship with the curriculum of the Kwatijariga Indigenous School, we also conducted a documentary research on materials (textbooks, curriculum references and educational legislation) that reproduce constant content of cultural astronomy. Although the documents analyzed do not make explicit the term cultural astronomy or synonyms, the analysis shows that contents related to this theme are present in the official curricula, except for the science curriculum proposal for the state of Amazonas, which did not present the theme. The results showed, in the participant observation and the interviews with the traditional connoisseurs, that the knowledge about the Parintintin sky is present in their daily practices. In the interviews, the teachers stated that they had not yet dealt with the knowledge about the Parintintin sky in the classroom. The speeches of the teachers marked the hierarchy among the curricular components, evident in official documents such as, for example, the BNCC, where mathematics and the Portuguese language had a higher status. Subversion to the official curriculum was also present in the speech of teachers. They stated that they did not use the textbook and demonstrated that they used their curriculum.