Entre mundos: as proposições e implicações que emergem dos estudos de educação escolar indígena

Abstract

Indigenous school education (EEI) has a long historical process—more than that, the historical struggle for the affirmation of indigenous peoples and their active participation in social life, whether within or outside their territories, spans centuries. After the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of 1988, discussions about EEI expanded significantly, both legally and academically. In the legal sphere, the right to school education from an intercultural, bilingual, specific, and differentiated perspective was strengthened by a series of laws, ordinances, resolutions, and regulations. In Brazilian academic production, there has been a continuous expansion of studies developed in the most diverse areas of knowledge, especially from the second half of the 1990s onward. In the field of education, studies on EEI have diversified, with recurring themes such as the historical movement of EEI in Brazil, reflections on advances, challenges, and bureaucracies in the consolidation of acquired rights, accounts of experiences regarding “differentiated and intercultural schools,” “differentiated curriculum,” teaching materials, and the articulation of knowledge. Considering the extensive academic production and the historical process marked by deep tensions and contradictions, we seek to investigate how these works propose the concepts of EEI and the dialogue between indigenous culture and Western perspectives in education. Our study aims to contribute to deepening the conceptual reflection on the EEI process itself, not limiting itself to reproducing what is established within the Brazilian bibliographical production in the studied field but rather questioning it. The searches for these works were initially conducted using keywords specific to the field and were expanded throughout the research. We organized a study corpus specifically composed of articles published in interdisciplinary journals in the fields of education and anthropology, among others. Through two categories, we analyzed and identified the most frequent propositions, called recurrences (R), and the sporadic propositions, called dissonances (D). We present the ways in which the concepts are addressed in these works and their main conceptual implications. From our analyses, we observed that the works propose EEI in a diversified way; regarding the concept of indigenous education (EI), there is a certain consensus in the propositions. As for the dialogue between indigenous and Western culture, when mentioned in the works, it is presented in a fragmented and superficial manner, as a part or complement in the works, with rare exceptions where this issue is taken as a whole.