Professoras indígenas Kaingang

formação inicial, profissão docente e empoderamento feminino

Abstract

This article discusses how Kaingang woman who study at a public university in Rio Grande do Sul live and give meaning to their teaching training. In addition to the narratives of these women, obtained via semi-structured individual and group interviews, documentary sources were analyzed, based on contributions from Latin American decolonial studies, in dialogue with feminist epistemology, especially the production of indigenous researchers. It was found that, although the interviewees value higher education teaching training as a space for empowerment and construction of knowledge and socio-political relationships that are important for themselves and their communities, they also experience it as a challenging experience. Conflicts arising from ethnic-racial, cultural and gender oppression experienced by the interviewees and their families were problematized; the difficulty of reconciling work, studies and raising children, amplified by socioeconomic exclusion and rights violations to which they are exposed; the distancing of the academic curriculum from Kaingang culture and the ways of producing knowledge of indigenous peoples, a reality that strains their conceptions of what it means to be a teacher and what/how should be taught in indigenous schools. It is concluded that the improvement of institutional mechanisms to guarantee indigenous rights, combined with intercultural dialogue carried out inside and outside the classroom, can contribute to facing these challenges.