The education of ethnic-racial relationships in biology textbooks: a historical analysis

• Grant number: 19/04962-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Master
• Start date: December 01, 2019
• End date: September 30, 2021
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Education - Specific topics in Education
• Principal Investigator: Douglas Verrangia Correa da Silva
• Grantee: Florença Freitas Silvério
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The curriculum is a space of reproduction and production of meanings, in which disputes around them are materialized. The curriculum as a racial text has been pointed by researchers as a vehicle for a Eurocentric rationality. The textbook as one of the manifestations of the written curriculum is a historical testimony of the trajectory of the school disciplines. As a curriculum and historical testimony, it is the object of imbricate interests and the product of power relationships, which can reproduce social relations, but also challenge them. From this perspective, we take Biology textbooks as objects of a study in order to characterize how the social and institutional demands to educate more democratic racial relationships are manifested in these materials. In a preliminary study, we noticed that recent Biology books were affected by a cultural flow between society and curriculum, in order to address more explicitly and positively the ethnic-racial diversity present in our society. Thus, we intend to characterize how this movement happened in the last 20 years. In this way, we can understand better the interpretations that these materials are doing of a social demand, generated in the Black Movement, transformed into public policy: a project of education of the ethnic-racial relationships. (AU)