Reality Pedagogy in Brazilian Public Schools

• In Event: Cultivating Equitable and Racially Just Teaching and Learning: An Imperative in Brazilian Public Schools

Abstract

Despite the longstanding problematic of banking approaches to education (Freire, 1970) Brazilian public school teaching continues to be marked by lecturing, justified under the guise of the inferiority and/or deficits of Black students, their families, and communities. Such an approach to teaching dehumanizes students and compromises relationships between teachers and students. To counter what Freire titled pedagogy of the oppressed, which is alive and well in Brazilian public schools, we engaged in a participatory action research, studying what happened when reality pedagogy (Emdin, 2017) was negotiated by teachers and students and implemented via active pedagogical approaches. Namely, teachers and students teachers in three public schools predominantly serving low-income Black students in Recife, Brazil engaged in
:
• cogenerative dialogues building on students’ knowledges, identities, interests, and lived experiences,
• coteaching—whereby teachers learned from and with their students,
• cosmopolitanism—honoring the culturally-grounded value of interdependence, positioning position human beings as responsible for each other,
• context—connecting students’ lives outside of the classroom to their learning, and
• content—acknowledging the Eurocentrism (Asante, 1991) of content and engaging students as curriculum codesigners.

We conducted observations to understand these approaches in practice, student focus groups to analyze how students experienced active pedagogical approaches and how they saw these in relationship to their learning, and a series of three teacher interviews (Seidman, 2019). Findings indicate that active pedagogical approaches are a site for the unlearning of damaging deficit stereotypes, where the humanity of learners is centered from an assets-based perspective and the funds of knowledge (Gonzalez et al., 2009) of their communities are positively leveraged. Implications point toward the need to position students as actors of their own learning, to trouble the binary of teacher and learner, and to focus on relationship as a key aspect of teaching.

Authors

• Auxiliadora Padilha, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

• Isabel Pauline Lima de Brito, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco

• Marina Jacinto da Silva Oliveira, Instituto Federal de Pernambuco