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This is to certify that the

thesis entitled
BLACK ORGANIZATIONS' DEMANDS FOR THE INCLUSION OF AFRO-BRAZI-

LIAN ISSUES IN THE SCHOOL CURRICULUM: THE DYNAMICS OF THE MO- i
VEMENT FOR CURRICULUM CHANGE IN bELO HORIZONTE,bRALLL, IN THE '
EARLY 19908.

presented by

Silvani dos Santos Valentim

has been accepted towards fulﬁllment
of the requirements for

M-A- degree mm
SCHOOL or EDUCATION

 

DEPARTMENT OF TEACHER EDUCATION

@mmwwb

Major professora

Date AUGUST 7, 1995

 

0-7639 MS U is an Afﬁrmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

 

 

LIBRARY
MIOI'Ilgan State
Unlvorslty

 

 

 

.—~ --~-----‘\' I- r» f'P-Ie'. v/w- r ' '\ -_..'.- $-‘

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.

DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE
'i’ T 0 6 2005 l

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

MSU le An Afﬁrmative Action/Ewe! Opportunlty Inetltwon
1

BLA

FOR

BLACK ORGANIZATIONS' DEMANDS FOR THE INCLUSION
OF AFRO-BRAZILIAN ISSUES IN THE SCHOOL
CURRICULUM: THE DYNAMICS OF THE MOVEMENT
FOR CURRICULUM CHANGE IN BELO HORIZONT E, BRAZIL,
IN THE EARLY 19905.

B)’

Silvani dos Santos Valentim

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulﬁllment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Department of Curriculum and Teaching

1995

BLAl

FOR (

This s
reform and
with leader
curriculum r
main local 11
State and l»
Gerais and l
and implemt
struggles for
as beginning
“ill PTO\rde
lessons learnt
reform lI1 the
concrete Chan
Whether Or n

Afro.

Brallllan

ABSTRACT

BLACK ORGANIZATIONS' DEMANDS FOR THE INCLUSION
OF AFRO-BRAZILIAN ISSUES IN THE SCHOOL
CURRICULUM: THE DYNAMICS OF THE MOVEMENT
FOR CURRICULUM CHANGE IN BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL,
IN THE EARLY 19905.

By

Silvani dos Santos Valentim

This study will be useful both for those interested in curriculum
reform and in the civil rights of minority groups. Data include interviews
with leaders of the Black community involved in the debates for
curriculum change in Belo Horizonte in the early 19903; analysis of the
main local newspaper in 1990; analysis of two documents written by the
State and Municipal Boards of Education regarding literacy in Minas
Gerais and Belo Horizonte. The experience of school curriculum reform
and implementation in the United States since the 19505, with the
struggles for school desegregation and the Civil Rights movement, as well
as beginning experiences of multiculturalism in schools in the late 19605
will provide a theoretical and political framework. It seems that the
lessons learned by the Black leaders from the ﬁrst round of curriculum
reform in the early 19905 led them to reconsider more structural and
concrete changes seen in current educational projects in Belo Horizonte.
Whether or not this leads to fuller and more equitable participation by

Afro-Brazilians in the educational scene in Brazil remains to be seen.

For Deocacina dos Santos Valentim,
minha mae,
from whom I learned the most
signiﬁcant lessons.

iii

 

 

 

Tl
with ﬁ’i
necessit)
Brazil 31:
mitten t
infomiatit

conscious:

My e
and friend,
and Person
feminist apt
emironmem
barriers 311d

necessity 0ft

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The process of writing this work was not an isolated one. I shared
with friends and professors, with my family and interviewees, the
necessity of describing and reﬂecting upon racial inequalities, both in
Brazil and the United States. Our hope is that this academic work, also
written to fulﬁll an academic requirement, might be a source of
information about racial and social inequalities, and perhaps a tool for

consciousness-raising.

My especial thanks to Dr. Sandra Hollingsworth (Sam), my advisor
and friend, from whom I have received very strong intellectual guidance
and personal support since the beginning of my Masters program. Her
feminist approaches and commitment to justice in education created an
environment that gave me the necessary strength to overcome language
baniers and other difﬁculties that could jeopardize the importance and
necessity of writing this thesis.

iv

I v
and l;
on m:
irrrpor
studen
policie

politica

I z
Dean 01

presence

 

interestet
regarding
section, r

existence,

With
P011 “CE” 51
WEIShingtO.

I Can "0! ex

From
made financj
frOm SUCh a

I wish to thank Dr. Lauren Young for sharing with me her knowledge
and lived experience as an African-American professor, and for serving
on my committee. Our conversations always gave me new insights and
important information on racial issues in the United States. As one of her
students, I discussed the necessity of being skeptical about educational
policies that do not take into account the social, racial, cultural, and

political context of educational settings, especially inner-city schools.

I am particularly thankful to Dr. John Schwille (Jack), the Assistant
Dean of International Studies in Education, who honored me with his
presence on my comnrittee, for sharing with me his wisdom and for being
interested in what I had to say. Prof. J acks's contribution and questions
regarding the framework of my research, especially the methodology
section, was fundamental in the process of bringing this thesis to

existence.

With Margo K. Kelly I shared love and received the tenderness and
political support that enhanced my spirit. When staying with her in
Washington, DC, important bibliography and information were gathered.
I can not express how thankful I am to her.

From Ford F oundation/Laspau I received the scholarship which
made ﬁnancially possible the accomplishment of having a Masters degree
from such a distinguished educational institution as the school of
Education at Michigan State University.

V

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ........................................................................
List of Figures .......................................................................

Introduction ............................................................................

CHAPTER I : CHANGING SCHOOL CURRICULUM TO
ADDRESS RACIAL INEQUALITIES ....................................

1. Background .......................................................................
1.1. Proposals for Curriculum Change in Brazil ......................
1.2. The United States of America Context ............................
1.3. Multicultural Approaches ...............................................

CHAPTER H: METHODOLOGY ..........................................

2. Method ..............................................................................
2.1. Doing Qualitative Research .............................................
2.2. Open-ended Interviews ...................................................

2.3. Document Analysis .........................................................

ix

01

08

09

17

27

30

43

44

46

47

58

 

 

2.4. Fe
CHAPT
IN BEL
NO R01

3.1heL

 

2.4. Personal Reﬂection ......................................................... 59
CHAPTER IH: THE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT
IN BELO HORIZONTE IN THE EARLY 19905: THERE WAS
NO ROOM FOR ALL CHILDREN .......................................... 62
3. The Debate in the New Paper ................................................ 63

3.1. The Quality of Public Schools and their Relation with
the Government ................................................................. 64

3.2. Teachers' Unions and Parent's Organizations
Denounce the Educational Situation in the State .................. 68

3.3. The Role of the State in Education .................................... 71

3.4. Board of Education Positions and Decisions to Improve
the Public Educational System in Minas Gerais .................... 75

CHAPTER IV: BELO HORIZONTE CITY AND THE
BLACK ORGANIZATIONS DEMANDS FOR SCHOOL
CURRICULUM CHANGE IN THE EARLY 1990's .................... 82

4. Race and Education in Belo Horizonte ..................................... 83

4.1. The Movement for Curriculum Change
in Belo Horizonte: the Participating Groups ............................. 87

4.2. The Movement for Curriculum Change
in Belo Horizonte: Tensions Among the Groups ..................... 92

4.2.1. Who Were the Interviewees? ......................................... 97

4.3. The Role of Education in Multiracial
Societies with Developing Economies ................................ 101

vii

 

 

4.4.

4.5.'

C HAP
5. W113
APPEN
PROTC
INTER‘

LIST OI

4.4. Race and Culture in the School Curriculmn ......................... 109

4.5. The Necessity of Improving Teacher Education .................. 116
4.6. The Necessity of School Reconstruction ............................ 123
CHAPTER V: DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION ............................ 133
5. What Are We Left With? ......................................................... 140

APPENDIX A: STRUCTURAL OPEN-ENDED INTERVIEWS
PROTOCOL AND NEW QUESTIONS ADDED TO THE
INTERVIEWS PROTOCOL ...................................................... 142

LIST OF REFERENCES ............................................................ 146

viii

 

 

TABLI

THE PE
TO SCI It
AND COl

LIST OF TABLES

TABLE I PAGE

THE PERCENTAGE OF THOSE WHO HAVE NEVER BEEN

TO SCHOOL (7-24 YEARS OLD), ACCORDING TO AGE
AND COLOR. BRAZIL, 1982 ............................................................................ 23

ix

 

FIGURE 1:
FM: AYES
IN MINAS (

FIGURE 2:
FIRST POLII
CITY HALL .

FIGURE 3;
OBJECTIVES
AFRO-Brutal
SCHOOLS ......

 

 

 

LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE 1: PAGE
FIVE AXES OF THE PROGRAM TO ERADICATE ILLITERACY
IN MINAS GERAIS - BRAZIL, DECADE 1990/2000 ...................................... 77

FIGURE 2: PAGE
FIRST POLITICAL - PEDAGOGICAL CONGRESS. BELO HORIZONTE,
CITY HALL -l990. MAIN RECOMIVIENDATIONS ........................................ 79

FIGURE 3: PAGE
OBJECTIVES OF THE COMMISSION FOR "CITIZENSHIP AND

AFRO-BRAZILIAN CULTURE IN BELO HORIZONTE MUNICIPAL
SCHOOLS ...................................................................................................... 96

f ‘\

 

 

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INTRODUCTION

Thousands of Black children and adolescents go to school
in order to accomplish the civil right of becoming educated.
The process of humiliation and exclusion that these
children and adolescents are submitted to during their
schooling process would make anybody concerned. Black
organizations critically evaluate this process and came up
with the conclusion: It is deﬁnitely not, as usually afﬁrmed,
a problem of Blacks. It constitutes a serious problem of the
Brazilian society.1

The school curriculum has been identiﬁed as one area in which the
dominant culture and unequal social relations have been able to reproduce
themselves in contemporary capitalist societies. Through oppressive and
hegemonic ideologies, Apple (1990) asserts, the school curricultun
reproduces and legitimates social and racial inequalities. By the same
token however, those relations of domination are also seen as having
counter-movements that challenge the mechanisms created and used to
perpetuate inequalities of race, Class, and gender in education. The social
dynamics of such counter-movements in a City called Belo Horizonte,
Brazil, constitute the empirical base for this study. Within the movement

for curriculum reform and racial justice in the Brazilian society, as well in

 

1Annals of the conference WHEN. Instituto de Recursos Humanos
.1050 Pinheiro. BelO Horizonte. Junho 27-30, 1987.

 

 

 

the UniteII
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arguments
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This
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Brazil, in
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destitute OI

institutionali

  
   
  
  
  

body of resc
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associations
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contribution ('-

the United States, there are similar arguments for including issues of
concern to African-descent people in the public school cru'riculum. These
arguments suggest that production of knowledge in school can be
reconﬁgured toward less traumatic learning experiences for Black

children and other minorities in any multiracial society.

This study to achieve such inclusive goals constitutes an attempt to
summarize the movement for curriculum reform in Belo Horizonte,
Brazil, in the early 19905. It looks at the experiences, opinions and
struggles of a signiﬁcant sector of the Brazilian society that has been
destitute of its civil rights as a result of economic oppression and
institutionalized racism. At the same time, this study is part of a wider
body of research which describes how social inequalities are experienced
in the Brazilian society. For example, research on neighborhood
associations and the ﬁght for working Class members access to public
schools (Moullin, 1991) has raised questions about social inequalities
across classes to the Brazilian government since the 19605. The main
contribution of this study will be the treatment of race as a fundamental
category for understanding Brazilian educational inequities.
Unfortunately, race is treated as an epiphenomenon in much Brazilian
educational research. This study will bring issues of race to the center by
asking: (I) How Black leaders for civil rights in Brazil suggested revising
the school curriculum? (2) During the curriculum reform movement, were
relations established between microlevel Black leaders and the Municipal
Board of Education (the macrolevel educational ofﬁce in charge of
curriculum discussions and alterations at the local level)? (3)What

previous knowledge did Black leaders have about school reorganization

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and curriculum implementation strategies? (4) What demands for
inclusion Of Black issues were central to the school curriculum alteration
platform? (5) Were knowledge and assumptions about multiculturalism

and Afrocentricism built into the curriculum reform proposal?

These questions emerge from previous inquiries on education and
the social sciences in Brazil, which provide a way Of understanding how
to combat racial and social inequalities faced by non-Whites and the
poor. Prior educational and sociological research studies of contemporary
Brazilian society have asked questions about the racial dynamics that
pervade classroom relations, families, and school curriculum. These

questions include:

e Why are Whites twice as successful in school as African-
Brazilians, even when Aﬁican-Brazilians have social backgrounds similar
to those of Whites? (Hasenbalg & Silva, 1990).

e Do Black and White families in multiracial societies envision
schools differently, even if they come from similar socioeconomic
backgrounds? (Rama, 1989; Rosemberg, 19913).

e Why do African-Brazilian families tend to enroll their children in
school later than White families, even when both racial groups have a
parallel social background? (Barbosa, 1983; Rosemberg, 1991b).

e DO African-Brazilian families tend to live in neighborhoods with
precarious resources and services such as education even when their
social and econonric backgrounds would allow them to live in better
conditions? (Rosemberg, 1991; Rosemberg & Pinto 1988).

o How do Aﬁican—Brazilian Children and adolescents in many situations
manage to succeed as street merchants and caretakers of their families
when they have to deal with complex mathematical concepts, if they have

 

 

dropped 1
education
question n

0 Which
curricultn
dropouts

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examine
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In other
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reform ‘

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(the knowler
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Brazilian [can
Change by brin
"busy" agenda .

 

dropped out because of their schooling failure? Where do they get their
education? (Carraher et al., 1991). For an excellent assessment of this
question in the USA, see Delpit (1992).

0 Which cultures, knowledge, and values are found in the core
curriculum of inner-city schools in Brazil? Are there high munbers of
dropouts? (Goncalves, 1986; Silva, 1993; Valentim, 1989).

Apple (1990) suggests that to understand such questions, we must
examine social movements for curriculum reform and try to ascertain why
"progressive social movements which aim at certain kinds of school
reforms such as community participation and control of institutions are
often less successful than their proponents would like them to be"(p. 65).
In other words we must ask questions leading to the understanding of the
roots of social and racial inequalities in contemporary societies and how
reform proponents implement actions for social and racial equity within

these societies.

This study, a description of and reﬂection upon a movement for
curriculum reform in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in the early 1990s,
constitutes an attempt to learn from the experience of those Black men
and women community leaders who struggled to transform public schools
and recreate the meaning of schooling. In the process of refusing to be
seen as politically powerless and consumers of extraneous knowledge
(the knowledge considered superior and predominant in the school
curriculum) they took racial justice in their own hands. Those African-
Brazilian leaders made sense of that process for school-crmiculum
change by bringing the lived experiences of the Black community to the
"busy" agenda of school administrators.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the dynamics present in
Black organizations' demands for the inclusion of African-Brazilian issues
in the school curriculum in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, in the 19903. This
study will highlight the opinions and lived experiences of a group of
African-Brazilian leaders, all of them educators (meaning holding a
teaching certiﬁcate or/and because of their involvement in consciousness
raising projects about education), in their struggle to overcome
educational inequities resulting from Brazilian educational policies. This
study will be useful both for those interested in curriculum reform and in

the civil rights of minority groups.

Several resources will inform this study. Data include interviews
with leaders of the Black community involved in the debates for
curriculum change in Belo Horizonte in the early 1990; analyses of the
main local newspaper in 1990; assessment of the ofﬁcial curriculum and
programs of Belo Horizonte Municipal Board of Education in the 1990s,
and the curriculum and programs presently in place; analysis of two
documents written by the State and Municipal Boards of Education
regarding literacy in Minas Gerais and Belo Horizonte. A signiﬁcant
theme is the extent to which African-Brazilian issues are included in the
school curriculum. The experience of school curriculum reform and
implementation in the United States since the 1950s, with the struggles
for school desegregation and the Civil Rights movement, as well as
beginning experiences of multiculturalism in schools during the 19608
will provide a theoretical and political framework. The intent of this

 

 

 

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Change in

framing is to draw out similar patterns in educational reform with respect

to social inequalities in Brazil and the United States.

Belo Horizonte, the capital of the State of Minas Gerais, was
chosen as the setting for this research because of its national and regional
importance in the articulation of initiatives for educational reform. An
important organization of Black leaders discussing and demanding school
curriculum change started in Belo Horizonte. Following the mobilization
of Blacks in S50 Paulo and in other states during the 1980s, the National
Conference on Education and Discrimination Against Blacks organized in
Belo Horizonte in 1987 was a catalyst for the movement for curriculum
reform in the 1990s.

By the end of the dictatorship period in Brazil (1964-1978), Blacks
were ready to take a stand against racial inequities. This study will
attempt to reveal how in the early 1990s in Belo Horizonte, the Black
community struggled to bring about racial justice in the public educational
system. This study will also attempt to understand educational and social
policies at the micro-level and how these micro-level experiences
inﬂuenced or failed to inﬂuence local and governmental educational

decisions.

The contribution from this narrative to educational theory rests in
the purpose, motives, and historical context that placed together those
leaders of the Black community, as a group, demanding curriculum

change in a speciﬁc city and historical time. The main ambition of this

{\

 

 

 

stud;

raeia

study is to bring forward their beliefs and their struggle to overcome

racial and social injustice in Brazil.

CHAPTER I

CHANGING SCHOOL CURRICULUM TO ADDRESS RACIAL
INEQUALITIES

\

 

 

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1. Background

In terms of basic public instruction in Brazil there is one point of
agreement: it is considered an troubled educational system. The
educational system in Brazil ranks among the top of the most problematic

educational systems in developing countries.

World Bank reports (from 1990 to 1994), the Hmnan Development
Index (from the same period) published by the United Nations, and
documents published by the UNESCO and UNICEF on basic education
and literacy, clearly indicate the incompetence of the Brazilian
government in the ﬁeld of education. Freitag (1994) says "Brazil is
highlighted in 1990, according to UNESCO, as a nation with one of the
highest levels of illiteracy in the contemporary world, 18.7%. In Latin
America, Brazil would only present a better result if compared with Haiti
(47%), Guatemala (45%), El Salvador (27%), Honduras (27%), and
Bolivia (22%)" (p. 122).

It is important to note, however, that in Brazil the level of illiteracy
is decreasing: 40% in 1960; 34% in 1970; 25% in 1980; 18.7% in 1990;
14.2% (estimation to the year 2000). However, if one takes 4 years of
completed schooling as the average period to consider somebody as
basically able to write and read, instead of 19% of illiterates according to
Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), that number
jumps to 43.5% in 1987. The incongruity in the percentage of illiterates
for the same years is due to the different conceptions of literacy. The

IBGE considers as literate those able to write and read a simple letter.

 

 

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those

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and actit

10

For educators and specialists in literacy and oral language, literate are
those who have completed at least 4 years of schooling and are able to

produce written work based on elementary skills such as spelling.

Klein and Ribeiro (1991) analyzed the Educational Census of the
Ministry of Education and determined that the lack of promotion from
one grade to another, rather than entrance into the basic school system,
was the central problem regarding literacy. Problems endogenous to the
public school system in Brazil, according to these authors, deserve careful

attention and intervention in order to improve educational outcomes.

Common explanations for why the public educational system in
Brazil is so poor are endless. There are those who blame the inertia of
boards of education in supervising the school organization, in order to
ensure equity in the distribution of services. There are those who would
argue that the main problem rests in the school organizational system,
seen as performing roles of selection and socialization which are
incapable of going beyond limits imposed by unequal structures in
society. Others would blame the state itself, because of its incompetence
in responding to the demands of local citizens. Other concerns abound:
the inadequacy of the curriculum; a weak teacher preparation program;
the lack of interest in education in general because of the economic costs
of such endeavors; the irresponsibility and limitations of parents and other
caregivers in providing the necessary home environment for school
learners to continue the learning process started in school; the absence of
bridges between schools and families. Further, institutional racism is alive

and active in the school system permeating instructional materials, the

11

school curriculum, and instructor practices in the classroom. Finally,
teachers lack preparation to deal with children and adolescents from
racial and cultural backgrounds that are quite different from the racial and
cultural backgrounds found in the mainstream society.

In a system that is riddled with inadequacies and problems, the
circumstances for Black youth are much worse. In some cases the
arguments against the Brazilian educational system and its pedagogic
practice overlap. The educational outcomes for Blacks prove that Blacks
are disadvantaged, even when the income of both groups is parallel.
According to Becker (1990) - a leading researcher on literacy in Brazil --
the Brazilian school system has failed Blacks and working class children
in terms of teaching them how to read and write. The prevailing system
denotes a lack of commitment of the government. A signiﬁcant number of
Black leaders, Black scholars and researchers on education (Aﬁican—
Brazilian or not) believe that on the top of the incompetence and lack of
interest in teaching Black children and others from the working class,
there is an eurocentric standpoint and stereotypes from White

supremacists which aim to hold Black children back in public schools.

These contemporary educational problems have their roots in the
Brazilian educational history, from the Colonial period to the
establishment of Republican ideals in the early twentieth century. There
was rampant genocide of indigenous people. The Portuguese colonizers
of Brazil paid little or no attention to the education of the "settlers" from
non-noble families. The Aﬁicans brought in as slaves were prohibited any

kind of literacy. This situation is in contrast to the experience of European

 

Pi

countrie
In those
fundame
noble far
intelliger
(Haguett
relation '
bible tot
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12

countries and nations like the United States, colonized by British Empire.
In those countries, the Protestant religion is believed to have played a
fundamental role in establishing literacy among Whites, even from non-
noble families. On the other hand, many believed that Blacks had no soul,
intelligence, or religion. Worshipers needed to be able to read the Bible
(Haguette, 1990). Brazil, colonized by Roman Catholics, had a different
relation with "sacred words": somebody would read and interpret the
bible to those who needed salvation. This meant there was no necessity
for systematic education for Whites of non-noble ascendance. Printing
was completely prohibited in Brazil until the ﬁrst decade of the nineteenth
century when the Portuguese Crown moved to Rio de Janeiro, ﬂeeing

from the French army.

Looking ﬁ'om contemporary perspectives, it seems quite difﬁcult to
understand such a religious inﬂuence in the acculturation and domination
of the so called "new world." The result in the Brazilian case was a late
and precarious organization of the public education system. According to
F reitag:

The ﬁrst educational policy promoted by the Brazilian state
started in the twentieth centtny, one century after the
independence of Brazil from Portugal in 1822. Meanwhile
countries of Spanish colonization had universities created by the

Spanish Crown and Vatican, half a century after the Columbus
discovery [sic] of the Americans. (1994, p. 126)

Most of today's 150 million Brazilians are descendants of native
Brazilians, Aﬁicans, and a minority of Asians, Middle Eastern,

Portuguese and other Europeans. In the last 100 years, waves of

13

immigrants came from Italy, Spain, Germany, Lebanon, Syria, and Japan.
These latter groups, who received incentives from the Brazilian
government interested in "whitening" the population, came to work in the
southern coﬂ°ee plantations, in the factories in the industrial center of S50
Paulo, in small farms around this same city, and in the southern states:
Parana, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul. The Middle Eastern
immigrants set up small shops, and some became major merchants. What
is observed in Brazil today is that those cultural groups who share a
common whiteness of skin color (with the exception of some Middle
Eastemers and Japanese) have been economically and socially successful,
compared to Aﬁican-Brazilians who arrived about 400 years before them.
In addition to their social and economic status, those cultural groups
sharing a similar whiteness were elevated to models of beauty,
intelligence, and the "better" culture, as if it were possible to talk in terms
of "better" cultures.

For Black people in Brazil, access to education, jobs, and housing is
a ﬁrndamental right of being a citizen. Yet citizenship has always been
problematic in Brazilian discourses. At the end of the 19th century when
Brazil became a Republic (November 15, 1889), the liberal discourse of
equality of opportunities left out former slaves. The end of the slavery
period May 13,1888) and the Proclamation of Republic came almost at
the same time. However the abysmal inequalities to which former slaves

and their descendants were subject, as occurred to other Black peoples in

 

 

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the Diasporal, constitute a neglect of their experience, hurnanness, and

political civil rights.

By the middle of the 20th century, after the Second World War,
Blacks were promoted to "second class citizens." By the dawn of the
1970s, Blacks believed that their children might ﬁnd better jobs if they
had better education in a country that was rapidly becoming modern and
industrialized. The educational reform of 1971 and 1982 (laws 5692/71
and 7044/82) changed the length and content of school curriculum,
emphasizing its professional/vocational orientation. Since 1971, the
number of years for the basic period of schooling shifted from 9 to 8.
Also the Adrrrission Exam, usually taken in the ﬁfth grade, was
suppressed. These changes were implemented because Black and
working class families were better able (because of economic growth) to
send their children to school. Enrollments were growmg fast. However,
quantity and quality were seen as two divorced issues. What Blacks and
working class families had hoped in terms of educational opportunities
did not come completely true since the occupational structure, social

mobility mechanisms, school organization, and institutional racism kept
their children falling behind in school and in the workplace.

In the context of this educational history it is important to bring

forward an aspect that has been overlooked by many educational

 

1According to Harris (1994, April) ”historically the term Diaspora has been applied most frequently
to the Jewish dispersion, in recent years it has become common in studies of African, Chinese,
Indian, and a host of other communities outside their homeland... In Africa the basic problems
stems from decisions made by Europeans at the Berlin conference of 1884-1885, which essentially
set the boundaries of most African States.”

15

researchers, namely, the issue of racial inequalities in Brazil and its
different facets. There is a mainstream belief in Brazil that race and skin
color do not make difference, fulﬁlling the French liberal presuppositions
grounded in liberty, equality, and fraternity. This mainstream belief has
created and reinforced racial inequalities all over Brazil. Skidrnore (1990,
p. 2) points to the discourse of some racial democrats such as Vianna
Moog who afﬁrmed that "the high-test, most signiﬁcant and most edifying
aspect of our culture is racial brotherhood." Senator Petronio Portela
affirmed in 1977: "In Brazil, access to society depends upon individual
effort, intellectual ability, and merit We have all inherited common
attributes, and what we are building -- socially, economically and
politically - proves the correctness of our rejection of the myths of racial
superiority." Those racial democrats would blame the economic and
social disadvantages in Brazilian society on the past. However, the
unequal educational opportunities for Blacks in Brazil has its roots in
occupational structures, social mobility mechanisms, and institutional
racism. The hierarchy of social beneﬁts which characterizes Brazil social
history is rooted in colonial experiences of domination that are still alive

in modern forms of neo-colonialism.

Progressive Brazilian educators, sociologists, anthropologists and
other scholars in the social sciences and education became conscious of
the need to address racial inequalities within Brazilian society as a
fundamental vehicle for understanding the Brazilian racial dynamics. The
ﬁrst publications critical of claims for racial democracy were developed

in 1950 sponsored by UNESCO. Sao Paulo (Southeast) and Bahia
(Northeast), constituted the main geographical base for these anti-racial

16

democracy studies. Gilberto F reyre, one of the most arduous defenders of
racial democracy and Portuguese colonialism in Brazil and in Aﬁica, was
put under severe scrutiny. His classic book W (The
Master and the Slaves) was seen as portraying a fake harmony between
Whites and Blacks in Brazil. After World War H the interest in Brazilian
racial relations increased and other sociological studies critiquing the
ideology of racial democracy were presented. Thales de Azevedo, Roger
Bastide, Florestan Fernandes, Octavio Ianni, Fernando Henrique Cardoso
(the current president of Brazil), and their collaborators were the most
important researchers addressing issues of "whitening ideology" in Brazil
in the 1950s, 1960s, and 19705. Their work had just one crucial
limitation: the treatment of race as a epiphenomenon. They did not see
race as a signiﬁcant category by itself. They believed the equalization of
social inequalities would bring racial justice. In Florestan F emandes' two
classic volrunes: IntegracarLdQNegronaSQciedadejeﬂlasses (published
in 1973) race remained a dilemma that might be solved only with the
advancement of social and economic relations within Brazilian society.
F emandes and his colleagues had created the new paradigm for the
understanding of racial inequality in Brazil. However, according to
Winant:
their tendency to see the persistence of racial inequality as a
manifestation of supposedly more fundamental class antagonism
(reductionism) resulted in an inability to see race as
theoretically ﬂexible, as opposed to an a priori, category. In
writing about racial dynamics the revisionists tended to ignore

the changing sociohistorical meaning of race in Brazil (1994, p.
135)

17

In 1979, the sociologist Carlos Hasenbalg published Discriminacﬁo
WWW. He deepened and
advanced Florestan Femandes' accounts of racial relations in Brazil. One
important contribution of Hansenbalg's approach was his analysis of the
forms and manifestations of the whitening ideology and racial democracy.
Based on qualitative and quantitative data, he showed a range of racist
practices and assumptions which condemned Aﬁican descendants in
Brazil to disadvantages in terms of housing, health, jobs, and education
(Hansenbalg, 1979). The last factor, education, became the focus for a
series of investigations on educational inequalities in Brazil. Equally
important has been the contribution of Nelson do Valle Silva. He
presented statistical evidence based on economic data that substantiate
racial inequality in education (Silva, 1985). Both authors, Silva and
Hasenbalg, seem convinced of the necessity in disrupting the racial order
in Brazil. This differs from the generation of researchers on racial
inequalities in Brazil publishing in the 1940s, 19505, 19605, 19705, and
19805, who did not take race as a fundamental category itself to the
understanding of the Brazilian society. The big challenge was, therefore,
how to develop a strategy for disruption.

1.1. Proposals for Curriculum Change in Brazil

It has been afﬁrmed by Rama (1989), Hasenbalg and Silva (1990),
Rosemberg (1991), and Klein and Ribeiro (1991), that one important way
of intervening in racial inequalities in education is to target the
endogenous problems manifested in school: the school curriculum was

the target of this work.

18

In discussing the issue of curriculum, as well its importance to the
improvement of school outcomes and the build up of racial justice in
education in Brazil, it is important to analyze how racial justice in
education has been approached by professionals in the Brazilian school

system, researchers on education, and Black organizations.

After the end of the dictatorship period in Brazil (1964-197 8),
democratization and reorganization of social movements became a reality
all over Brazil and spawned a number of Black organizations. Black
organizations constituted the beginning of demands for a better school
curriculum. Educational researchers, experts, and professionals, whether
they belonged to the Black movement or not, participated in the
transformation of those demands into proposals for the evaluation and
modiﬁcation of the curricular texts and schoolbooks. Texts in use were
seen as ﬁlled with sexism and racism -- particularly in the ways they
depicted Blacks, women, and native Brazilians. (See Silva, 1988). The
existing school curriculum was seen as reinforcing racial discrimination in

Brazilian society.

Several key events and initiatives led to the movement for
curriculum change in Belo Horizonte. In the middle 19805, the Carlos
Chagas Foundation investigated the conditions of the African-Brazilian
community living in the state of S50 Paulo. In 1985, the "First National
Meeting about the Reality of Blacks and Education" was held in Porto
Alegre (South of Brazil). In 1986, the African-Brazilian Community
Participation and Development Council based in S50 Paulo, together with

the Carlos Chagas Foundation, organized a national conference to discuss

 

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19

the issue of "Black People and Education." The sixth and seventh
meetings of the "Northern and Northeastem African-Brazilians" was held
in Aracajr'r in 1986, and Recife 1988, respectively. These meetings
discussed the issue of discrimination and education. In 1987, the School
of Education of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and the J 050
Pinheiro Human Resources Institute, organized a national conference to
discuss "Education and Discrimination against Blacks" Also, in Belo
Horizonte, a project called "Racism in Schools" was conducted by a
group of researchers. Finally, in 1990, the "Commission for the
Elimination of Racism in the Municipal Schools of Belo Horizonte" was
created. Later this commission came to be called "Citizenship and Afro-

Brazilian Culture in Municipal Schools in Belo Horizonte."

Proposals for curriculum change in elementary and secondary
schools included the teaching of Black history and culture within the
context of an African-Brazilian culture. The curriculum would not only
include the contours of the Aﬁican—Brazilian culture but be written in
such a way to allow African-Brazilian students to develop self-esteem
and self-identity. A further change in teacher education was to shift from
the transmission of knowledge to production of knowledge in classroom.
The inclusion of this perspective in teacher preparation programs would
enable a fostering of cultural and racial respect in the classroom. Minority
students would be empowered through the development of self-esteem

arising knowledge of their social, cultural and racial backgrounds.

An anti-racist curriculum was seen by those involved in racial

justice in education as having these characteristics:

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1- Eliminate low teacher expectations of students from racial "nrinority"
backgrounds.

2- Avoid ignoring students and begin taking students' experiences
seriously in classrooms

3- Eliminate the perception of cultural deprivation. Cultural deprivation
arguments have been used to suggest that children from racial "minority"
backgrounds have intellectual limitations due to familial problems and/ or

the cultural environment.

The production of knowledge through education would recognize
the richness and contradictions of culture, race, gender and religion. This
would be a change from the practice of emphasizing only the transmission
of school subjects, based on the belief that all children must receive the

same "superior body of formal knowledge."

A common view emerged from all of these events, initiatives, and
process described above: Brazil is essentially a multiethnic and
multiracial society, marked by a racial dynarrric considered adverse for
the fostering of Black children's identity. Winant, in discussing the fact of

Blackness in Brazil asserts:

Perhaps nowhere else in the world it is more difﬁcult to achieve
a clear understanding of who one is according to the prevailing
system of social categorization. Perhaps in no other country it is
as arduous to assess the signiﬁcance of race in everyday life, to
take race into account in one's negotiation of survival, not to
mentions in one's quest for happiness or prosperity. In no other
country is the salience of race so uncertain, so disguised in its

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21

quotidian manifestation, so explicitly denied and implicitly
upheld (1994, p. 154).

Brazil has the largest Black population outside of Aﬁica. Only
Nigeria in West Africa, with its approximately 120 million people,
exceeds the Brazilian Black population. Brazil, the giant of South
America, with its 150 million inhabitants in which Blacks constitute
approximately 60% of the population, has earned the attention of OAS
(Organization of the American States), UNTCEF(United Nations Children

Found), and other international organizations.

Racial discrimination in the United States since the 19505 has
brought about the urgent necessity of curriculum change in school
settings. Since the 19805, educational debates on class, race, and gender
(not just "curriculum reform") were seen as more precise ways of
understanding and combating inequalities in education. In Brazil as well
as in Latin America, however, race has had less attention in an
understanding of contemporary social inequalities. The Brazilian Institute
of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) report of 1994, shows that Whites
earn more than twice as much as Blacks, and women's pay is 57 % less
than the wage received by men. Fourteen percent of children aged 10 and
13 are working (there is no breakdown by color), although in one of
Brazil's poor northern states, that ﬁgure reaches nearly 30 percent.
Sixteen percent of Brazilian workers either never went to school or
dropped out before completing the ﬁrst grade. The Brazilian monthly
minimum wage in March 1995 was estimated in $70.00 (seventy dollars).
This minimum wage constituted approximately 10% of the total income

necessary to handle the basic necessities of a family with 3 members.

22

The category of race plays an important role in this discussion due
to the fact that non-Whites are disadvantaged from the time they enter
school. Table 1, translated from Hasenbalg and Silva (1990, p.8),
illustrates this pattern. Among seven-year-olds (the obligatory age for
starting the ﬁrst grade in the public school system), there is a high
proportion of children who have never officially been to school: around
40% of Whites and 55% of Blacks and pardos.3 From this particular age
to the end of the obligatory period of schooling (fourteen year olds), what
one can observe is the rapid absorption of Whites into schools. It reaches
around 95% by the age of eleven. Among Blacks and Pardos, the
percentage of those who have never gone to school after age 11, is about

three times larger than for Whites.

 

3 Pardo is used in the Census to categorize those who consider themselves neither whites, nor
Blacks. In telling the Census Taker their color in 1980, they ranged from classifying themselves
from "chocolate to the ”color of the night" or the ”color of the sin”. The Census of 1980 ended up
with more than one hundred different colors used by non-Whites. Under this category "pardo", the
Census organized everybody who would be considered, or considered themselves, neither Whites,
nor Blacks. It is important to say that for the Black movement, Pardos are considered Blacks. This is
why the category "African- Brazilian" has been preferred rather than Blacks.

23

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Fewer Blacks enroll in the ﬁrst grade at the obligatory age of seven than
Whites, even when students' social and economic backgrounds are
comparable. A great number of Blacks will not complete the obligatory
schooling period (8 years) (see Rosemberg, 1991; Hasenbalg & Silva,
1990). According to these authors, even among students who stay in school
for 8 years or more, there often is a lack of advancement. Many are
retained in the same grade for two, three, or more years. Black children
tend to leave school with fewer grade levels completed compared to

White children.

In Brazil, the roots of this educational conﬁguration appear to come -
from the Whites' desire for maintaining power at the expense of the larger
population. The government's discourse speaks in behalf .of social change,

but its actions in fact have excluded major sectors of the society.

24

In contemporary discourses on inequality, discrimination has been
historically disguised, because in my view it is ideologically necessary for
those in power to show that poorer social classes failed because they did
not make enough personal effort to go beyond the limitations of gender,
race and social origin. Kozol (1991) says that those discourses and
policies are something that "resembles equity but never reaches it. They
are close enough to equity to silence criticism, by approximating justice,

but far enough from equity to guarantee the beneﬁts enjoyed by privilege"
(p. 1 7 5).

It is important to note that the process of cuniculum reform in
Brazil has a double face in which one side appears "official." The
Ministry of Education, the Federal Council of Education, Municipal and
State Boards of Education in the 27 United States of Brazil (including the
Federal District, Brasilia, -- the capital of Brazil), school administrators
and school commissions are charged with democratically implementing
educational laws and curriculum adaptations in local contexts. Usually
this process is done with the advice of professors from prestigious federal
universities such as the Federal University of Minas Gerais. The second
side of curriculum reform, however, is that important segments of the
Brazilian society (such as African-Brazilian groups) do not identify with
the concept of education and resultant decisions that come from the

official sectors.

To give a clear example of this problem, we need only look at

results following the State of Minas Gerais Congress of Education in

25

1982. The conception of knowledge present in the project did not match

the expectations of minority' sectors and their allies.

The school should provide to everybody who has access to
school, without discrimination, the universal knowledge,
namely, the knowledge historically accumulated, necessary to
the education of its citizens. All instruction presented by the
state must have the best quality, independent of social class
pertinence... In this sense, this universal characteristic is not a
pure extension of the educational opportunities, but requires the
acceptance of all. Respecting their values, answering to their
necessities, allowing the development by them of their cultural
and linguistic local universe, articulating their universe with the
universal knowledge. [italics mine] (Cunha, 1991, p. 174)

The key problem is that the concept of "universal knowledge" is
denounced by African-Brazilians and other sectors of the Brazilian
society because it is seen as excluding their culture, values, and history. It
is also denounced by other sectors of the Brazilian society such as
working class, women, and other non-White groups. Even when there is
speciﬁc attention to social inequalities, issues for Aﬁican-Brazilians are
overlooked. For example, one intention of 1987 curricular reformers was
to "change the eurocentric emphasis to an approach that would privilege
Brazil and Latin America" (Cunha, 1991, p. 207). The problem is that
Europe colonized Brazil and other countries in Latin America, and the
hegemonic vision in those countries was and is still Eurocentric. This
curricular proposal ended up privileging European frameworks and the
ideology of ofﬁcial groups that had and still have their backs to Latin
America and their eyes turned toward Europe and its supposed "superior

civilized history."

C i

 

 

 

26

The urgent necessity of addressing racial inequalities and
curriculum in Brazil can be justiﬁed and demanded as a simple matter of
racial justice. It gets complicated and challenging when one comes to
realize that racial justice is not easily achievable, especially in societies
like Brazil where profound social inequalities tend to create deeper racial

injustices and vice-versa. According to Wignaraja

The UNDP's Human Development Report of 1990 characterizes
Brazil as a high GNP-per-capita country with modest human
development and little equity... Brazil represents the cruder type
of capitalism transformation, which has resulted in a massive
polarization of the people and a very deep debt crisis, having
been incorporated into a global system without any safeguards in
terms of the equity of internal structural changes. (1993, p. 14)

Clearly a case has been made for the need for curriculum reform in
Brazil. This study will look at one such reform movement in some depth,
through interviews with leaders of the Black community in Belo
Horizonte, an analysis of Belo Horizonte's main newspaper and
documents about education published by the Municipal Board of
Education, and my own personal reﬂections as an Afro-Brazilian. Before
discussing the methodology used to cany out this project, it seems
worthwhile to locate the Brazilian educational "problem" in the context of
the United States’ experience. The idea is to give readers some
background to understand better some assumptions regarding school
curriculum that we might expect Black leaders in Belo Horizonte to hold,
given that many educational ideas originating in Europe and North

America are introduced to Brazil where they remain implanted.

 

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27

1.2. The United States of America Context

The demographic social fabric of the United States makes it the most
diverse society in the world. The US population has changed from
approximately 90% European 200 years ago to approximately 50%
European, nowadays. People of Aﬁican descent represent approximately
20%, and people of Central and South American and Caribbean descent
also represent approximately 20%. Peoples of Asian origin have grown

to approximately 8% (Gordon, 1992).

In the United States there is a strong debate and a huge number of
publications regarding the representation and assessment of different
cultural groups in the school curriculum, and how these multiple
representations can contribute to the development of intellectual
competence and racial justice in education, and in society. However,
what has been observed is that the democratization of school
opportunities, and the assessment of different cultures through the school
cuniculum have not resulted in equal opportunity for students to
accomplish their goals, or in the celebrating of multiple ethnic heritage, or
in learning from the collective experiences of different groups. Instead,
“there has been a subtle but systematic insistence on the examination and
celebration of a particular and single American heritage, namely,
European” (Gordon 1992, p. 235).

It is Eisner (1985) who points to the fact that "the analysis of
society as a basis for the formulation of curriculum content and goals is

not as modern as one might believe"(p.78). In the United States, this issue

It

U

 

 

 

28

goes back to the school survey movement of 1910, whose methods were
described in 1928. What gives new nuances to the discussion of
curriculum change is, indeed, the changing social and historical context,
as well as the role played by the agents involved. The shifting in the
question: "what knowledge is of most worth" to "whose knowledge is of
most worth" as posed by Apple (1990, p. vii), gives us an important tool -
- perhaps the main tool -- for analyzing the movement for curriculum
change in Belo Horizonte in the early 19905. It seems that those involved
in that movement, even though not experts in curriculum, understood the
problem. It is in the cuniculum that the fostering of students' knowledge
takes place and where the problem of who controls knowledge is posed.

Apple asserts that:

as Gramsci argued, the control of the knowledge preserving and
producing sectors of a society is a critical factor in enhancing the
ideological dominance of one group of pe0ple or one class over
less powerful groups of peoples or classes. In this regard, the
role of the school in selecting, preserving, and passing on
conceptions of competence, ideological norms and values (and
often only certain social groups' 'knowledge') - all of which are
embedded within both the overt and the hidden curricula in
schools -- is of no small moment. (1990, p. 57 )

In this sense the notion of knowledge as a social construction is
enhanced by a better understanding of where this knowledge comes from,
whom it beneﬁts, and why. It is fundamental to have a sense of different
approaches to school cuniculum in order to better understand the
Brazilian educational context in which the movement for curriculum

change took place. According to Eisner (1985, p. 62), there are ﬁve

29

concepts of curriculum, interlocked and all important to the understanding

of the purpose and content of the school curriculum, namely:

(1) development of cognitive processes. In this view, the major
functions of the school are (a) to help children learn how to learn
and (b) to provide them with the opportunities to use and
strengthen the variety of intellectual faculties that they possess...
(2) Academic rationalism one of the oldest and most basic
orientations to curriculum goals and content. This orientation
argues that the major ﬁmction of the school is to foster the
intellectual growth of the student in those subject matters most
worthy of study.... (3) A third orientation to curriculum is one
that emphasizes the primacy of personal meaning and the
school's responsibility to develop programs that make such
meaning possible. The curriculum is to emerge out of the
sympathetic interaction of teachers and students within a process
called teacher-pupil planning... (4) Social adaptation and social
reconstruction is one that derives its aims and contents from an
analysis of the society the school is designed to serve... (5)
Curriculum as technology conceives cuniculum planning as
being essentially a technical undertaking, a question of relating
means to ends once the ends have been formulated.

This lengthy quotation gives us a good idea about varying concepts
of school curriculum. What remains to be understood is how discussions
of multiculturalism, multiethnicity and Afrocentrism challenge and are

challenged by those notions of curriculum.

The objective of this study - an analysis of the dynamics present in
Black organizations' demands for the inclusion of Aﬁican Brazilian issues
in school curriculum -- requires an examination of conceptualizations of
multiculturalism, multiethnicity and Afrocentrism along with their

contradictions, value, and critiques. The following paragraphs also

(l

L. .,

 

 

 

30

provide background on the history and social context of the struggle for
civil rights of African descent people in the United States.

1.3. Multicultural Approaches

In the United States, the assessment, development and application
of concepts such as Afrocentrism and multiculturalism have generated
enormous debates throughout the country. Mass media and educational
institutions have started a strong debate on the social and educational
implications of the multiculturalism and Afrocentrism approach to US
society. As a result, many critiques have arisen against their underlying

assumptions and theoretical viewpoints.

The theory and practice of multiculturalism in education emerged in
the United States in the late 19605. The historical context that created the
concept of multiculturalism deserves some attention. According to
McCarthy (1991, p. 38) "Multiculturalism is, therefore, a product of a
particular historical conjecture of relations among the state, contending
racial minorities and majority groups, and policy intellectuals in the
United States, at a time when the discourse over school had become
increasingly racialized." Multiculturalism is a political and educational
project that carries, according to McCarthy (1991), contradictory and

problematic solutions to racial inequality in education.

Multicultural approaches have antecedents in the Civil Rights'

Movement. In 1954, in one of the most important decisions of that period,
the US Supreme Court decision number 347/483 ended officially the

31

regime of segregated schools. Specially this was an important Civil

Rights victory for Blacks. Brown v. BoatdmﬂEducationmLIopeka,

Kansas, in addition to overturning Elisa): v. Ferguson of 1896 that
established the separate but equal doctrine, was the starting point for a

series of initiatives demanding structural changes in the educational

system.

Whites, especially in the South, decided to block the Supreme
Court's decision of 1954. Many White organized groups, were
determined to resist any change in racial and social relations in the United
States. The desegregation of schools was a very slow process. The
opposition to the desegregation of public school was strong. Especially in
the South, White and Black students were racially separated by classes
or/and Black students were not allowed in extracurricular activities. In
some schools, Black staffs were assigned to inferior positions and Whites

with less preparation were assigned to superior positions (Franklin &
Moss Jr., 1988).

In despite of that, Blacks and other racial groups also in the struggle
for civil rights: Whites, Latinos, Caribbeans, and Asians, held the belief
that the school desegregation would be able to bring racial justice,
especially in education. Their dream did not come true. Blacks witnessed
the assassination of their leaders, from Malcom X (1965) to Martin
Luther King Jr. (1968), as well nrunerous other Civil Right organizers.
White supremacist groups and individuals kept in place their effort to
block the Civil Rights movement. White mothers organized

demonstrations against school desegregation, and White construction

It

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32

workers were radically opposed to the employment of Black joumeymen
and apprentices. Black leaders in the US must have felt what one Black
leader in Belo Horizonte recently said: Nils estamos por nossa conta [we
are on our own]. Some Blacks in the US radicalized their organizations
and adopted nationalist ideals. As Franklin and Moss Jr. describe:
Even before his death Martin Luther King had been criticized by
militant, action-oriented blacks who insisted that whites would
not respond to black demands on the basis of Christian charity,
good will, or even peaceful demonstrations. Some also felt that
whites would never concede complete equality to blacks. In
1967 the Black Power Conference in Newark, New Jersey,
called for the 'partitioning of the United States into two separate
independent nations, one to be a homeland for white and the
other to be a homeland for black Americans'. meanwhile, a
group of young California militants led by Huey P. Newton and

Bobby Scale organized the Black Panther Party for Self-
Defense; and Eldridge Cleaver, its most articulate spokesman,

declared that the choice before the country was 'total liberty for
black people or total destruction of America'. (1988, p. 459)

It was the time when Blacks came to understand that Whites were
not about giving away their White supremacist assumptions, racist
practices, and White privilege. Educational policy makers and liberal
intellectuals had to shift from an assirnilationist approach in which Blacks
and other minorities were relegated to second-class citizenship
(McCarthy, 1991), to a discourse based on plurality and cultural
diversity.

There is contemporary conceptual and political disagreement, in the
United States, regarding multiculturalism. There are a munber of scholars

who see multiculturalism, as well as multiethnicity, as aiming to

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33

"explode" racial identity. Those arguing against multiculturalism judge
this as evading Black racial consciousness and the non-identiﬁcation with
Aﬁica in pursuit of a raceless society. Multiculturalism as a paradigm
sometimes fails to recognize that the existence of racism relates to the
possession and exercise of political and economic control and authority.
It also is less often seen as related to forms of resistance to the power of

dominant social groups.

One interesting ﬁnding is that the leaders interviewed did not seem
to have a set of established ideas on multiculturalism and Afrocentrism,
nor access to literature about such issues. All of them saw those ideas as
concepts being put in practice in the United States. This does not imply
ignorance, but suggests that these leaders developed their ideas about
racial justice in education from a different perspective. For instance, an

interviewee asserted:

Multiculturalism leads me to the notion of globalization of
economy. It probably works in countries that have a fragmented
racial identity. Because you dilute the authentic cultural
expression of peoples. It does not mean that all cultures do not
have their pluralities. It does not mean that culture does not
have pluralities that are in the essence of culture. If for
instance, I hold the assumption that Africa is my reference and
matrix, although I have never been to Africa, I carry with me
the heritage and ancestrality as I'm able to see it.
Multiculturalism aﬁirms and neglects my presence in the world.
(Severino)

This Black leader is calling attention to the possible contradictions that
discourses on pluralism can bring, and how they can be used to hide

conﬂicts, racism and inequalities. The implications of multiculturalism

34

and Afrocentrism for the Brazilian educational arena; therefore, deserve

further discussion.

The word "multiculturalism," according to Wurzel (1988), has two
meanings. One simply refers to the fact that human existence is inherently
and universally multicultural, even though historically, hmnankind hasn't
recognized this given fact. The second deﬁnition is based upon a
perspective which assumes that people act within the context of
multicultural society and that the key to multiculturalism is awareness.
Wurzel deﬁnes multiculturalism in education not only as an instructional

product but as

a continuous process involving (1) reﬂection, learning and the
development of cultural self-awareness, (2) the acceptance of
conﬂict for its educational potential, (3) the willingness to learn
about one's own cultural reality from interaction with others, (4)
the improvement of commrmication with people from other
cultures, and (5) the recognition of the universality of
multiculturalism. (p. 3)

According to La Belle and Ward (1993), multiethnic and multiracial
societies should make efforts to ensure equity and justice for individuals
whose minority backgrounds, physical features, economic status, and
goals differ from dominant groups. The authors approach multiculturalism
as a tool for understanding the world order that goes toward more

globalization in economics and politics.

For the Chicago Cultural Studies Group (1992)
Multiculturalism has produced if anything an even greater rush

for utopian thinking than 'cultural studies'. For its adherents,
multiculturalism increasingly stands for a desire to rethink

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35

canons in the humanities - to rethink both their boundaries and
their function. It also stands for a desire to ﬁnd the cultural and
political norms appropriate to more heterogeneous societies
within and across nations, including norms for the production
and transmission of knowledge. Multiculturalism as a social
movement gets critical purchase because it intrinsically
challenges established norms, and can link together identity
struggles with a common rhetoric of difference and resistance.

(p. 531)

In his most recent book, WWW.
Banks (1994) reafﬁrms the aims of multicultural education: (1) to help
students understand their home and community cultures, and at the same
time helping students to get free from their cultural boundaries; (2) create
and maintain a civic community that works for common good, helping
students to acquire the knowledge, attitudes, and skills they will need to
participate in civic action to make society more equitable and just; (3) and
understand multicultural education is as an education for freedom. Those
three main objectives of multicultural education might be considered too
apolitical. Issues of social class hierarchy, and race as a social
construction seem not to be the target of multicultural education, as
presented by Banks. Educational changes for this author can be better
articulated within the concept of multiethnicity.

Multiethnic education is concerned with modifying the total
educational environment so that it is more reﬂective of the ethnic
diversity within American society. This includes not only the
study of ethnic cultures and experiences, but making institutional
changes within the school setting so that students from diverse
ethnic groups have equal educational opportunities. (Banks,
l979,p.23)

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36

Little doubt remains that almost all contemporary societies are
multiethnic (J. Banks,l979). There is no less doubt that they will continue
to be in the future. That observation, however, is only a starting point for
analysis, because the strength of ethnic attachment can also widely
diversify societies. On the one hand, modernization, with its double-sided
sword, diminishes attachment to culture and ancestrality. On the other
hand, culturally and ancestrally deﬁned groups persist; they may even be
intensiﬁed by forces released by modernization. Some consider
ethnic/cultural and racial identities the most powerful and deep form of
manifesting the sense of belonging to a nation (Anderson, 1991; Trouillot,
1990). The United States, since the 19505, has witnessed signiﬁcant
movements for curriculum reform based on racial and ethnic
compositions of its population. For example, according to Harris (1992):
"Aﬁicentrism proposes that people of Aﬁican descendent or cultural
orientation center their view and evaluation of the world within their
historical and ontological framework" (p.306). It is important to notice
that Afrocentrism does not imply what ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism

imply: one race, nation, or culture as superior.

Africentrism or Afrocentrism is the belief in the centrality of
Aﬁicans in postrrrodem history. It is our [Aﬁican's people]
history, our mythology, our creative motif, and our ethos
exemplifying our collective. Aﬁicentrism is only superﬁcially
related to color; it is more accurately a philosophical outlook
determined by history." (Asante, 1988, cited in Harris, 1992,
p.305)

Within the discussion of Aﬁicentrism, according to Banks (1992)

The Aﬁicentric conception emerged from the ﬁeld of Black
psychology... Two major elements of this context were the

37

ascendance, to an unprecedented status of attention, of the
political and economic interests of the African Diaspora; and the
unprecedented demise of what one Black philosopher [ Cornel
West], has described as the dead, impotent rhetoric of declining
and decaying civilization -- that is, postmodern thought in the
west. (p. 263)

In discussing race and curriculum in the United States, McCarthy
(1991) provides a critical overview of approaches to school cuniculum
from their ideological and political standpoints. What follows are three
contemporary approaches for implementing multicultural education in the
United States' schools, as categorized by McCarthy (1991), namely,
cultural understanding, cultural competence, and cultural emancipation.

According to McCarthy, cultural understanding in multicultural
education emphasizes the acceptance of cultural differences in the
classroom and in the school curriculum. It is expected that educational
programs, based on the cultural understanding approach, will contribute
toward the elimination of prejudice. It is important to understand that the
emphasis on cultural understanding goes beyond the development of
communication skills and respect for ethnic differences. It also
emphasizes the possibility of eliminating stereotypes related to race and

gender.

The cultural understanding model aims for the improvement of
communication among the diverse ethnic groups present in the school
system. It is based upon the notion of relativism in which ethnic groups
are supposed to have some common interests among them "a formal

parity with each other," according to McCarthy. School curriculum based

 

 

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38

on this model would have individuals noticing that they are different but
the same (since we are all human beings). American school critics have
raised concerns about attitudinal changes through cultural understanding
programs. According to McCarthy:

Writers such as Pettigrew (1974), Garcia (1974) and Gibson (1984) point
to tendency of proponents of cultural understanding models to
overemphasize the difference among ethnic groups, neglecting the
differences within any one group. They also draw attention to the
unintended effect of stereotyping which results ﬁ‘om multicultural
approaches that treat ethnic groups as 'monolithic entities possessing
uniform, discernible traits' For instance Garcia contends that advocates
of cultural understanding models tend to discuss Chicano culture as if it
were a set of values and customs possessed by all who are categorized as]
Chicanos or Mexican Americans This fallacy serves to create the new

stereotype which is found in the completion of the statement, Mexican
children are ....(1991, p. 46)

The cultural understanding standpoint tends to emphasize the
promotion of racial harmony and a tolerance for social and ethnic
differences. There is a "prejudiceless goal" in the cultural understanding
approach, as it is found in Banks (1979) contributions to the
understanding of the goals of multiculturalism. But, the great issue is how
to go beyond racial harmony and tolerance, and become able to challenge

institutional racism.

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39

Cultural competence is based on bilingual / bicultural skills and
pluralist values. The language and identity of diﬂerent ethnic groups who
live in the United States are the main focus of multiculturalism as a
cultural competence. Bicultural and bilingual programs within the cultural
competence framework represent a direct challenge to the prominence of
Anglo and other European values in the school curriculum. McCarthy
(1991) calls attention to the fact that "attempts to teach minority students
how to cross over the language and culture of mainstream America also
commit these students to a trajectory that leads toward incorporation and
assimilation" (p. 50). Some educators have built a different model to
implement multicultural education. In searching for educational policies
and pedagogic practices capable of boosting racial justice in education,
models of cultural emancipation and social reconstruction were brought

forward.

The cultural emancipation model has particular signiﬁcance to this
study. In this approach, ethnicity and racial issues are at the center.
Minority under-achievement in the classroom is not seen not as a cultural
deﬁcit, but related to the suppression of minority cultures in the school
curriculum. Models of cultural emancipation and social reconstruction
hold some basic assmnptions in terms of the way concepts of race are

created by school dynamics.

a) There is a ﬁmdarnental mismatch between the school
cuniculum and the life experience and cultural backgrounds of
American minority youth... b) This mismatch exists because
schools privilege white middle-class values while simultaneously
suppressing the culture of minority youth c) Thus, schools
play a critical role in the production of differential educational

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opportunities and life chances for minority and majority youth.
(1) Educators should help to redress this pattern of inequality by
embarking upon multicultural curricular reform that would
provide equality of opportrmity for academic success for
minority students. (MacCarthy, 1991, p. 52)

The cultural emancipation approach to multicultural education
would suggest curriculum reform based on structural changes for social
and economic changes in society. Educators involved in the cultural
emancipation approach believe that cultural and social change can occur
in education if there is a shift in the school curriculrun. If Blacks, Latinos
and other minorities students can have their history, culture and social
values addressed as dependent variables to their schooling process, and
not as extraneous beliefs that just appear in the school curriculum as an
appendage, society will change. This approach, though, for McCarthy has

not gone far enough.

As Troyna and Williams (1986) have pointed out, attempts at the
reorganization of the school curriculum to include more
historically and culturally sensitive materials on minorities have
not signiﬁcantly affected the unequal relations that exist between
blacks and whites in school and in society (...) By focusing on
sensitivity training and on individual difference, multicultural
proponents typically skirt the very problem which multicultural
education seeks to address: WHITE RACISM. (1991, p. 54)

Those authors and many others, have called attention to the societal limits
of multicultural education, as well its ability and power to promote

signiﬁcative change in minority students' schooling.

The United Stated is a good example of a social formation where

minority ethnic (social and cultural characteristics) and racial (inherited

41

traces) groups have been excluded from the mainstream society. They do
not ﬁt the patterns created by this society. The "others" or the
"minorities" are current terms used to name those people of color. These
"extraneous" people in its majority are ﬁom the working class. According

to Zeichner, in the United States

students of color comprise about 30 percent of public school
students, are the majority in 25 of the nation's 50 largest school
districts, and are the majority in some states like New Mexico,
Texas, and California. In the 20 largest school districts, students
of color comprise over 70 percent of the total school enrollment.

(1993, p. 3)

In this scenario, most teachers are White, female, and monolingual who
would prefer to teach in White middle class neighborhoods, if given a
choice. This conﬁguration will not soon change since minorities are less
represented in the educational ﬁeld, and graduate schools admit low
percentages of minorities into their programs. Frierson Jr. (1990, p. 12)
asserts that "since 1975, the number and percentage of Black recipients of
doctorates in education have declined, decreasing ﬁom 9.2% in 1975 to
only 7.0% in 1986; 691 Aﬁican Americans received a doctorate in
education in 1976, as compared with only 421 in 1986." This lack of
representation of Aﬁican—Americans is noticed also in important forums
of discussion as in the American Educational Research Association in
which among its 15,888 members, it is estimated that about 570 (less than
4%) are Aﬁican American. It seems that the task professors have on their
hands is their own preparation as well as teachers, to be able to interact

with students who are culturally and racially different from them.

42

Meanwhile, we are left with some haunting questions: (1) If we
change (expand) the curriculum in order to include the standpoint of
"minorities," is there a guarantee that this cruriculum will not still carry
different knowledge and expectations for children belonging to different
social classes? (2) Is it possible to take for granted that the school
commitment to social justice would bring about racial justice? (3) Should
equity in education assume that schools must consider themselves to be
the redemptor of the poor? (4) How much does teacher education
confront gender, class and race issues? (5) Are families' abilities to
interact with school being included in the movement for curriculum
change? (6) Can schools overcome demographic, economic, social and

political realities simply by expanding the curriculmn?

These questions will be added to my initial ones in analyzing the
data. This study: BLACK ORGANIZATIONS' DEMANDS FOR THE
INCLUSION OF AFRICAN-DESCENT ISSUES IN THE SCHOOL
CURRICULUM IN BELO HORIZONTE, BRAZIL IN THE EARLY 19905,
strives to reveal grass-roots organizations' attempts to implement changes
in the municipal school's curriculum, to address racial inequities. It will
speak to the creation of Black organizations' protests against a fake and
folkloric racial democracy that has for centuries eroded any possibility of
racial justice. Though I am not able to generalize to other groups and
countries, perhaps the experiences of the Black leaders in Belo Horizonte
will be useful to other educational researchers and all those interested in
the development of curricula for social and racial justice. The
methodology used to carry on this study will be described in the

following section.

43

CHAPTER II

METHODOLOGY

44

2. Method.

As I begin this section on method, it is important to review the
focus of this study. My speciﬁc interest is less on the results of the
cmriculum movement in Brazil and more on the process. I want to bring
to light the process of organization, and what it meant to those actors
involved in that historical moment I have called when Black folks try to

take racial justice in their own hands.

To select an appropriate method for this study, I completed an
independent study on the methodological approaches to the study of
racial inequalities in education in the United States. I reviewed ERIC
(Educational Research Data Base Information Center) at the Michigan
State University Library, where 133 titles and abstracts were found under
the combination "Racial and Research Methodology", 61 using
quantitative approaches and 7 2 using qualitative ones. The descriptors
were: cultural differences, racism, racial inequality, gender,
multiculturalism, social class, ethnicity, diversity, race and ethnicity of
investigators, affirmative action, cross cultural-studies, ethnocentrism,
racial-bias, sex-bias, statistical-bias, feminism, stereotypes, cultural
pluralism, anti-Semitism, cultural differences, racism, and racial
inequality. My review revealed that as the mnnber of minority researchers
increased, the number of studies attending to racism and prejudice has
also risen. This does not mean that the number of Aﬁican Americans
researchers has substantially increased. What is noticeable is the increase
of researchers ﬁom other minority groups: women, Latinos, Caribbeans,

Asians, and homosexuals. I also discovered there is great diversity in the

45

deﬁning the word "racism." This diversity has led to the development of
new theories or reinterpretations of those theories. Thus, there was a
greater sophistication of both theoretical development and empirical
investigations of those theories. Many qualitative studies focus on
prejudice and discrimination, how prejudice is learned, class prejudice,
racism and self-esteem, the impact of social contact among diverse
groups, multiculturalism, the nature of social experiences, and the role of

schools.

From reviewmg studies on racism, as well studying meta-theory
approaches that, according to Worsley (1984, p. 4), are "set against and
lodged in history, focused on the theories and categories that have been
used by others, both by actors in the world of everyday life and by
specialists in theorizing, to make sense of what is happening to them", I
determined that I could best achieve the purpose of my study (1) through
a triangulated qualitative approach which includes both structured and
open-ended interviews; (2) a document analysis of both historic and
enacted documents; and (3) my own experiences as an Afro-Brazilian
educator in Belo Horizonte. To collect the data (1) I used structured
interviews with Black leaders in Belo Horizonte, followed by open-ended
conversation; (2) I reviewed relevant documents; (3) I recalled and
presented my personal experiences. It made possible some understanding
of how these nine leaders of the Black community organized and
evaluated the movement for cmriculum change in 1990, and what they

envisioned in terms of school curriculum for the future.

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46

2.1. Doing Qualitative Research

Most qualitative research aims to capture participants' experiences
as accurately as possible, understanding how participants think and
develop the perspectives that they hold. In other words, qualitative
research strives to give insight to the meaning people give to their
experiences. This assumption is very important because the lived
experiences of leaders of the Black community involved in the demand
for school curriculum reform was an important feature of this study. The
research was conducted from the middle of January of 1995 to until the
end of March of the same year. Visiting schools to see if any change
could be observed in the school curriculum would be an interesting follow
up; however it was not accomplished because of the length of time
designated to this study and goals of this master's thesis inquiry. Most of
the time was employed in the process of doing, transcribing, and
analyzing the interviews. The researcher's familiarity with Belo Horizonte
(see section 2.4), facilitated mobilization and contacts with the

interviewees.

According to Bogdan & Bilden (1982), there are ﬁve key points that
should be observed in doing qualitative research: (1) The researcher is the
key instrrnnent. This assumption constitutes an acknowledgment that the
research design, data collection, and analysis can be inﬂuenced by the
researcher. The qualitative researcher should be aware of this fact and
prepared to account for personal assumptions and biases in order to
understand an event from the participants' points of view. While

researchers can sometimes delegate the analysis of their data, qualitative

It

 

47

researchers cannot, because interpretation is the essence of qualitative
analysis. (2) Qualitative research is descriptive. In qualitative research,
numbers are used primarily to support narrative descriptions of events
and behaviors. The understandings that have been generated from a
speciﬁc study should be reported in quotations and descriptions of
behavior. (3) the qualitative researcher is concerned with process.
Focusing on the process can generate an understanding of how the
outcomes occurs.(4) Data are analyzed inductively. Theory is developed
and adjusted as the data are collected. The qualitative researcher strives
to understand the process of interpretation by which new deﬁnitions
become part of a human group's set of stable meanings. (5) Meaning is of
essential concern. The qualitative researcher is interested in

understanding how participants think and develop their perspectives.

2.2. Open-ended Interviews

Some authors describe interviewing as the most important data
collection technique in qualitative studies. According to Glesne and
Peshkin (1992, p. 92), "structured means you have speciﬁed questions
you know you want to ask; open means you are prepared to follow

unexpected leads that arise in the course of your interviewing."

From a phenomenological standpoint, the way to understand the
demands of Black leaders in Belo Horizonte was to try to uncover their
lived experience of education. The main focus was less centered in how

they organized their political platform and more concerned with the

48

nature or essence of their personal experience in organizing the

movement. As Van Manen asserts:

phenomenological human science is the study of lived or
existential meanings Phenomenology differs from other
disciplines in that it does not aim to explicate meanings speciﬁc
to particular cultures (ethnography), to certain social groups
(sociology), to historical periods (history), to mental types
(psychology), or to an individual's person life history
(biography). Rather, phenomenology attempts to explicate the
meanings as we live them in our everyday existence, or life
lifeworld Phenomenology research is a search for the fullness
of living, for the ways a woman possibly can experience the
world as a woman, for what it is to be a woman. (1990, p. 4;5)

Open to alternative constructions of reality and to the many possible
explanations of this same reality, phenomenology intends to grasp the
meaning of everyday experience. Practice within phenomenological
framework is an antecedent for theory. Theory comes later as result of
lived experience. "Theory does not control praxis, the theory of any
science of education comes always later. Theory can only make room for
itself once praxis has settled"(Van Manen 1990, p. 15). Lived experience
is assumed as socially constructed, and more complex than the written
outcomes of a report or description. The experiences of nine leaders from

different groups constituted the major focus for this analysis.

In order to understand how these leaders of Black organizations
conducted and evaluated the movement for curriculum change in 1990,
and what they envisioned in terms of school curriculum and racial justice
for the future, the following questions were used as framework and

guideline to organize the interviews:

49

(1) How did Black leaders for civil rights in Brazil suggest revising the
school curriculum? (2) During the curriculmn reform movement, were
relations established between leaders and the Municipal Board of
Education (the educational ofﬁce in charge of curriculum discussions and
alterations at the local level)? (3) What previous knowledge did Black
leaders have about school reorganization and curriculrnn implementation
strategies? (4) What demands for inclusion of Black issues were central
to the school curriculum alteration platform? (5) Were knowledge and
assumptions about multiculturalism and Afrocentricism built into the
curriculum reform proposal? These were the main points embedded into
a total of twenty speciﬁc structured questions which emerged as the
second level. A third layer of questions emerged from ﬁrrther open
conversation. They enriched and added new information to the earlier
questions. The ﬁrst two levels of questions - the big idea, and the 20
structured questions constituted the main tool. The open conversation was
also an important instrument to get information about the processes that
brought together a group of leaders of the Black community demanding

school curriculum change.

Most of the interviews took place in various Black organization's
conference rooms. Two of them took place in the interviewee's house at
their request. The structured questions were ordered according to a
logical sequence. Part 1: proﬁle of interview, her/his personal experience
and opinions about schooling, Afro-Brazilians issues, and curriculum
(questions 1 to 4). Part II: what motivated and mobilized the Black
leaders to organize the Municipal Commission Against Racism (questions

5 to 8). Part [Hz the internal process of discussion and preparation of the

50

platform for school curriculum change in Belo Horizonte (questions 9 to
13). Part IV: evaluation of the process (questions 14 to 20). Most of the
time, however, questions were not asked in exactly this sequence. Also,
some interviewees spent more time on one question than on another. For
instance those who had children spent more time on question number 1
than those who had none. The structured questions as well the ones added

as the interviews unfolded (level 3) can be found in appendix A of this
paper.

The interviews were conducted with representatives of three
different Black organizations in Belo Horizonte. Information about these
Black organizations is given in chapter IV. The interviewees were those
who coordinated the process for curriculum change, wrote documents,
and attended meetings with the Municipal Board of Education. Each
organization was allowed two representatives to the joint Commission
initially called "Commission Against Racism in Belo Horizonte' Public
Schools," and later "Citizenship and Afro-Brazilian Culture in Belo
Horizonte' Municipal Schools." During the interviews it was evident that
all these representatives were educators. The coordinator of each
organization was also interviewed in order to provide important

information on the internal processes in his/her organization.

In order to select and contact the leaders, I gained access to the ﬁrst
document written by this commission, which provided the names and
phone numbers of the members of "Citizenship and Afro-Brazilian
Culture in Belo Horizonte' Mmricipal Schools." After reading the

document I called and made appointments with those who were available,

51

expecting that she/he would be interested. Before the interview sessions, I
mailed a translated abstract of my master's thesis proposal, as well as a
consent form approved by the University Committee on Research
Involving Human Subjects at Michigan State University. These two texts

gave to them a better idea of my objectives and intentions.

The interviews took an average of approximately 2 hours and 30
min. Beforehand interviewees were told about the requirements for the
interview and the possible necessity of a follow up of approximately 1
hr. The estimate of time for the ﬁrst interview came from a pilot interview
protocol with two Afro-Brazilian volunteers (one male, one female) also
interested in issues of education and racial relations within the Brazilian
society. In the interval between the ﬁrst and second interviews, I
conducted research into the daily newspaper "Estado de Minas" and
analyzed data from the ﬁrst session. This was an important step because
the information from both sources, newspapers and interviews enriched
each other. For instance, I found no information in the newspapers that
school children in Belo Horizonte were sent to speciﬁc schools and/or to

speciﬁc classroom because of their race.

In conducting the interviews, issues of intersubj ectivity were
present. The path chosen in doing the interviews was that in which
researcher and researched met and developed a relationship marked by
the intention of going beyond data collection. Indeed, the intention was to
interpret a social experience, striving to understand the complexity of

feelings, social values, and beliefs. According to Van Manen:

52

In the human sciences, objectivity and subjectivity are not
mutually exclusive categories. Both ﬁnd their meaning and
signiﬁcance in the oriented (i.e., personal) relation that the
researcher establishes with the "object" of his or her inquiry.
Thus, objectivity means that the researchers remains true to the
object. The researcher becomes in a sense a guardian and a
defender of the true nature of the object. He or she wants to
show it, describe it, interpret it while remaining faithful to it --
aware that one is easily mislead, side-tracked, or enchanted by
extraneous elements. Subjectivity means that one needs to be as
perceptive, insightful, and discerning as one can be in order to
show or disclose the object in its full richness and its greatest
depth. Subjectivity means that we are strong in our orientation to
the object of study in a unique and personal way - while
avoiding the danger of becoming arbitrary, self-indul gent, or of
getting captivated and carried away by our unreﬂected
preconceptions. (1990, p. 20)

None contacted refused to be interviewed. It was quite the
opposite. All of them showed interest in talking about the process of
organizing the demands for curriculum change and in evaluating the
outcomes of the that process. They seemed to be happy because I (an
Afro-Brazilian female and educator) was also interested in understanding
and theorizing about their experiences. Due to the lack of research on
racial issues in Brazil, they hoped to make an important contribution to
the understanding of racial relations in Brazil and the diffusion of this
same understanding overseas. Earlier, as an undergraduate majoring in
Pedagogy at the School of Education of the Federal University of Minas
Gerais, as well as a member of the Interdisciplinary Group of Aﬁican
Brazilian Studies at this same university, I got to know their proposal for
crnriculum change. My previous knowledge helped establish the rapport

necessary for the construction of a trustful relation during the interviews.

53

According to Glesne and Peshkin (1992, p. 94) "Rapport is a distance-
reducing, anxiety-quieting, trust-building mechanism that primarily serves
the interest of the re searcher Rapport encourage informants to talk
about their own culture." Although not sufficient for the success of the
interaction between interviewer and interviewee, rapport is seen as an
important foundation. Rapport should not be confused with ﬁiendship as

Glesne and Peshkin also underscored:

ﬁiendship means mutual linking and affection and imply a sense
of intimacy and mutual bonding. We trust our ﬁiends; even
more, we like them and will do things for them that we would
not do for others A relationship characterized by rapport is
marked by conﬁdence and trust, but not necessarily by liking;
ﬁiendship invariably is. (1992, p. 94)

The interviews were recorded after asking if the interviewees would
feel comfortable with the procedure. The ﬁrst interviewee told me she
would not like to have the interview recorded. Her request was promptly
respected. I tried to be as natural as I could, taking handwritten notes
during the whole interview, while at the same time, trying to focus on the
respondent's talk. It was very difficult to focus on the interviewee's talk
because I was writing. I did my best, trying to capture all the words. By
the end of the interview I read to the interviewee what I had written to
make sure I had gotten all the information as verbatim as possible. At the
second session the respondent allowed me to make a recording. Because
the earlier session was the ﬁrst time in her life she had been interviewed,

she had not felt comfortable.

54

The other interviewees did not have any problems with tape
recording. A nricrocassette tape recorder and a separate external
microphone were used. An earphone allowed me to listen to the
interviews when riding in a bus or doing another activity. The
microcassette auto stop and light blinking mechanisms avoided the risk of
keep going with the interview when the tape was already full or due to
power failure the microcassette was not working. Even with an AC
adapter to plug in the electrical outlet, extra batteries and cassettes were
always at hand to avoid any unexpected happenings. Even when
recording the interviews, key words and phrases were written to
underscore the necessity of asking a question again, or to highlight an

important point for the open-ended conversation.

Because interviews were conducted with leaders of the Black
community and the interviewer was an Afro-Brazilian involved in Black
people's affairs at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, it was
necessary to pay attention to respondents' assumptions that the
interviewer knew in advance what they would say. The term "naive"
characterizes in qualitative re search the fact that even when the
researcher is familiar with the subject, her or his role is to be a learner in
the process of conducting interviews and observations. According to
Glesne and Peskin:

it entails a frame of mind by which you set aside your
assumptions (pretensions, in some cases) that you know what
your respondents mean when they tell you something, rather than
seek explanations about what they mean. Often the hazard is that
your research is on a topic about which you may know a great
deal through study and personal experience. What you know is

55

the basis for assumptions that preclude you from seeking
explanations and that shut down your depth-probe inclinations
(which derive from the conviction that you cannot really know
what is in the mind of others). (1992, p. 80)

In conducting the interviews the necessity of being naive was very
important. It opened space to say: please, could you tell me more about
this subject? Astuteness and discernment were very important elements as
well, because my own lived experience as a community organizer,
popular educator and member of the interdisciplinary group of Aﬁican-
Brazilian Studies could interfere in the process of listening to what those
nine leaders of the Black community and educators had to say. I had to be
very conscious of my role as interviewer and to distance my nonresearch
self from the interview moment in order to better apprehend and feel what

the respondents were communicating.

In order to organize and analyze the interview data, after it was
transcribed and translated I had to search in each interview for its main
ideas (level one). After ﬁnding the main ideas different themes emerged
(level 2) as following: schools in the past, schools today, and their
ﬁmction; school curriculum; private v. public schools; culturalism;
memory and history; cultural symbols; conscientization; racial and
cultural differences; discrimination; classroom evaluation; internalized
racism; poverty and competence; blaming Black children for their failure;
racial democracy; objective and goals of the commission against racism
in public schools; the movement for curriculum change as a vehicle for
consciousness; what makes school change; racial issues; Afro-Brazilian

culture; institutionalized racism; quota for Blacks in public school like in

56

the US; teacher education; disagreement in the commission; lack of
academic work on Blacks; pedagogical and methodological aspects of
schools; class v. race; white male; education v. schooling; technology;
Afro-Brazilian culture; Diaspora; sustained movement; different personal
reasons for involvement; multiculturalism; alternative project outside of
schools; cultural resistance; plural schools project; kids learn to be racist;

and Black movement v. the state; evaluation of the process.

After the categorization was completed for the ﬁrst interview the
themes started repeating themselves since the questions were basically
the same with variations in terms of what emphasis the interviewees

could add for which was really important to their organizations.

The following questions that have been formulated in the arena of
educational and sociological research helped me to make sense of what I
was learning from the interviewees, as well as give me insight to organize

the 40 themes presented above.

0 Why are Whites twice as successﬁrl in school as African-Brazilians,

even when Aﬁican—Brazilians have social backgrounds similar to those of
Whites?

0 Do Black and White families in multiracial societies envision schools
differently, even if they come from similar socioeconomic backgrounds?

0 Why do Aﬁican—Brazilian families tend to enroll their children in
school later than White families, even when both racial groups have a
parallel social background?

0 D0 Aﬁican—Brazilian families tend to live in neighborhoods with
precarious resources and services such as education even when their

57

socioeconomic-economic backgrounds would allow them to live in better
conditions?

0 How do Aﬁican-Brazilian children and adolescents in many situations
manage to succeed as street merchants and caretakers of their families
when they have to deal with complex mathematical concepts, if they have
dropped out because of their schooling failure? Where do they get their
education?

0 Which cultures, knowledge, and values are found in the core
curriculum of inner-city schools in Brazil? Are there high numbers of
drop outs?

Word processing played a very important role in doing the
categorization. (1) Similar responses were organized in the same ﬁle. For
instance all that was said about "public v. public schools" was allocated
to one ﬁle. This means that the ﬁrst step of categorization had 40
different ﬁles. (2) Then, it was time to reorganize those ﬁles, again,
breaking them into more speciﬁc themes which were helpful to the
understanding of the big ideas cited on page 48 and questions mentioned
in the last paragraph. What was not considered so signiﬁcant was saved
in another ﬁle under the name "leftover." There were still 40 ﬁles,
although with much less information. (3) The 40 ﬁles were copied and
pasted in a new ﬁle saved under the title "synthesis." this new ﬁle was
printed in order to get a better visualization of the whole text. Then, the
crossing categorization, or a search for comprehensive patterns started. It
was handwriting work. For instance, what was said about "private v.
public schools" could be placed in the discussion "of schools in the past,
schools today, and their ﬁmctions," or vice versa. (4) That interpretative

analysis generated the themes that are discussed in chapter IV: the role of

58

education in multiracial societies with developing economy, race and
culture in the school curriculunr, the necessity of teacher education
improvement, and the necessity of school reconstruction and racial justice

in education.

2.3. Document Analysis

In order to triangulate the data collected through interviews, three
types of written documents were analyzed: (1) Belo Horizonte's main
daily newspaper (Estado de Minas) in 1990, from January to March; (2)
the ofﬁcial curriculum used by the Municipal Board of EducationuBelo
Horizonte in the early 19905; and (3) documents written by the Municipal
and State Boards of Education, teachers' unions, and Black organizations
regarding their evaluation of the educational scenario in Belo Horizonte in
the early 19905. These historical documents corroborate and extend
information from the interviews. According to Glesne and Peshkin (1992,
p. 52) "Documents corroborate your observations and interviews and thus
make your ﬁndings more trustworthy. Beyond corroboration, they may
raise questions about your hunches and thereby shape new directions for

observations and interviews."

Located in the Public Archives of Minas Gerais, the newspapers
from January to March of 1990 were stored in microﬁlms. All the
information considered important was copied. This research on the
newspapers took about 25 hours of work. To localize the documents and

the ofﬁcial curriculum was not a difﬁcult task. Secretaries and

59

receptionists in the State and Municipal Boards of Education were very
helpful.

2.4. Personal Reﬂection.

The third point of the data analysis is my own personal experience
as an Aﬁican—Brazilian educator, and one who has worked on issues of
equity in Brazil. Mine is a political and feminist standpoint which states
that my own lived experiences have as much to do with the interpretation
of the data as other, more distant, theories and methodologies. "Feminist
research involves weaving the stories of both the researcher and her
respondents" (Cotterill & Letherby, 1993, p. 68).

My professional involvement with popular education started in 1987
(I used to be involved in grass roots and Black organizations before 1987,
but not as a professional activity). Being an educator in community-based
elementary school in Belo Horizonte's inner city projects allowed me to
get together with women and men for whom education was a valued tool
to change oppressive societal conditions. For me the most important
aspect of popular or community-based education was the possibility of
building an alternative project constructed with the eﬂon of the group, or
to debate alternative school pedagogical methods in weekly meetings

with the parents and community.

It is important to say that community-based schools in Brazil can be
considered a branch of popular education. Popular education involves

many aspects and activities; for example, dance, theater, music, debates

60

and community-based experiences of education. It means essentially that
these kinds of experience developed according to political and cultural
experiences of people who are considered subjects of their history. The
radicalism of popular education is embedded in its own micro
experiences, proof that the educational, economic and social reality of
Brazil is capable of change. In these experiences women and men go
beyond externally created structures in order to create others. Based on
Paulo Freire's epistemology and pedagogical principles and method,
knowledge is seen as an active process that is made and remade within
changing historical conditions. Using people's own experience the teacher
will be the facilitator in the process of learning how to read and write.
According to Freire's epistemology this process of educating and become
educated should be based on reﬂection and action, theory and practice -
called praxis. This process of communication as praxis is assumed to be
the conscientization of the participants. According to Freire (1972)
conscientization is the process leading toward a state of critical
consciousness, the process in which students (participants) are not seen
as passive recipients but as subjects of their knowledge, based on their
own experience. People are able to see their situations for what they are

and in such ways that moves to change adverse conditions are made.

A native of Rio de J aneiro, I spent 8 years in Belo Horizonte.
Dining this period besides being involved with projects of popular
education and Black activities, I worked as a prospective teacher in
public schools (teaching elementary and secondary graders) while I was
ﬁnishing my Bachelor's degree in education. During my undergraduate

pro gram I received a government grant to start to conduct educational

61

research at the Teacher Training Special Program in the School of
Education. In 1991, I was one of the organizers of the Interdisciplinary
Group of Aﬁican-Brazilian Studies at the Federal University of Minas
Gerais. In 1992 I worked for a non-Govemmental Organization helping to
develop educational projects for Black and working class women with

low incomes.

My own lived experience is an important feature in the analysis of
the data from interviews and documents. The interest in doing this work
is intrinsically related to what I have experienced as an Afro-Brazilian—
Latin Americannworking class originnwoman. The length of time
dedicated to this study was relatively short. However, my work was made
less difﬁcult because of the previous background in racial issues, and the
strong motivation to describe and analyze the dynamics of the movement
for curriculum change in Belo Horizonte in the early 19905. The
"continuous interaction between how we understand the world and who
we are as people....[demonstrates] how the reconstruction of knowledge

is inseparable from the reconstruction of ourselves." (Jaggar, cited in
Hollingsworth et. al., 1994, p. 7)

62

CHAPTER III

THE EDUCATIONAL CONTEXT IN BELO HORIZONTE
IN THE EARLY 19905 : THERE WAS NO ROOM
FOR ALL CHILDREN

63

3. The Debate in the Newspaper

During January, February and March of 1990, the major newspaper
of Belo Horizonte, "Estado de Minas," presented important articles
concerning the condition of education in the State of Minas Gerais (MG).
There was an official program: "Literacy Program 1990/2000 or "Literacy
Program to Eradicate Illiteracy in MG," and the "First Congress Political-
Pedagogic" organized by progressive sector of the Municipal Board of
Education. Research reports using quantitative data illustrated what
educational policy makers, statisticians, and teachers predicted for
schooling in MG at the beginning of a new decade. As stated in one of
the articles: "There is a risk that Minas Gerais will reach the year 2000
with a school system certainly as decadent as it was in the end of the
nineteenth century" (Estado de Minas, January 28,1990). The debate in
the newspaper showed an optimistic Municipal Board of Education. They
believed it was possible to meet the needs of those already enrolled in the

public system, and also, to take care of those leaving the private system.
Here are the key issues detailed in the articles:
quality of private schools and their relations with the government;

teachers' unions, and parents' organizations denouncing the educational
situation in Minas Gerais; and

board of education positions and decisions to improve the public school
system in Minas Gerais.

In general, however, educational perspectives for the 19905 were

very pessimistic. The Brazilian economy described in that period was

64

what the newspaper called a "chaotic prospect." For working class
families meeting basic necessities as food and housing were seen as
priority, and education had gone to the bottom of the list. The government
elected in November of 1989 was not eager for structural changes in

society and in education.

The new decade showed the educational scenario in Minas Gerais,
as well as all over the country, to be in a precarious condition:
professionals in education received low wages; there was a lack of
opportunity to enroll in public schools; costs were high to send children
to private schools. Those unhappy news articles appeared only on the
second day of 1990. The new year was likely to be one where public

education was not even a concern, and much less a priority.

3.1. The Quality of Private Schools and their Relations with the
Government

The Brazilian high inﬂation of 1990, the election of a new president,
and the creation of a project to invest in literacy in Minas Gerais, all
brought to the forefront the issue of private schools in educating the
population in the capital of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte which in 1990
had approximately 2.3 million inhabitants. It is the fourth largest city in
the country. A large number of students attended private schools in Belo
Horizonte. That is, private schools were seen as an important part of the

Brazilian educational system.

65

The president of Learning and Teaching Institutions of Minas
Gerais, evaluated the educational scene in Belo Horizonte and afﬁrmed
that "inﬂation is not a crucial issue." He believed that education should
not be treated superﬁcially - for instance limited to discussions of the
price of monthly fees. It is clear that he placed himself in defense of the
schools' owners. He wanted the government out of negotiations between
parents and private schools. According to him the government should be
concerned with the maintenance of public schools. Private schools'
administrators suggested that those not able to pay the monthly fee should
look to public schools for their children.

This issue exposed the educational situation in Minas Gerais not
only to persons concerned with public vs. private school issues, but to the
evaluation of professors and specialists in educational policies, as well as
researchers on literacy. Progressive educators argued that it was
necessary to ﬁnd ways to effectively advance and improve educational
outcomes in Minas Gerais. They saw as ﬁmdarnental the recuperation of
public schools, based upon the improvement of their quality as
institutions for teaching and learning. The recuperation of public schools
was also an issue of access and equity in which school curriculum
improvement was seen as depending upon. Without structural changes in
both educational systems, but especially in public schools - where the
majority of families from the working class look to enroll their children -
progressive educators and leaders of the Black community believed it
would be difficult to bring about structural change in the school

curriculum.

66

Research questioning the competence of both private and public
schools also occupied space in the newspapers. One following the daily
debate would notice a highlighted title: "Private instruction is not better."
This was the conclusion of a study conducted by a group of professors
and students from Federal University of Minas Gerais. The research,
started in 1986, was sponsored by the Board of Education of Minas
Gerais. The main purpose was to detect the reasons for the failure of the

secondary schools in this state.

Besides what the researchers called um quadro dc degradacdo (a
degrading scenario), they veriﬁed that secondary schools had 67.2% of
the teaching faculty who during an average period of ten years had never
received any kind of staﬂ development. The concern expressed in the
newspaper was that society was changing rapidly, and those teachers
were not being prepared to face those changes. On the other hand,
teachers were asked to work twice or three times as much because of the

Brazilian economic depression.

The researchers also showed that private school is not synonymous
with " good school." In Minas Gerais, only a handful of private and public
schools would have been described as being of good quality. In general,
degradation is present in both systems. There are no material and
pedagogic resources, no organization in the administrative area, no
teacher specialization, little interaction between teachers and students.
The researchers pointed to private schools as the main entity responsible
for the educational chaos in Minas Gerais. According to their

investigation, the private system had unofﬁcially assumed great part in the

67

responsibility of preparing students at the secondary school level, after
the educational reform of 1971(Law 5692/71). Instead of having more
public schools to try to contain the growing demand of the p0pulation for
schooling, during the military regime (1964-1978), there was a continued
transfer of resources from the government to empresdrios da educacdo
(entrepreneurs interested in investing in education). This issue goes back
to the development of urban-industrial capitalism in the Brazilian society
in the 19305, when education was directly linked to the necessities of the
economic development. In 1961, law 4.024 set the national basis for
education in Brazil, and the issue of private v. public schools was the
reason for a strong debate in which the role of both educational systems
was deﬁned. In 1961, the Association of Catholic Educators (AEC)
mobilized two thousand private schools for the defense of the "liberty of
teaching." Based on a humanist-liberal concept of education the private
system was recognized as being in the public interest by the Brazilian
government, and consequently public revenues were sent to private
schools. The Brazilian dictatorship period was the apiece of the problem
because the private system was used as a vehicle for the maintenance of

the military regime (Fonseca, 1992).

The researchers found that, from 197 2 and 1984, instead of more
public schools being constructed and improved, there was a boom in
networks of private schools. Minas Gerais had the largest network of
private schools. Companies and business people invested in such schools
to avoid taxes. Those investments, however, did not bring a signiﬁcant

improvement in education.

68

3.2. Teachers Unions and Parents' Organizations Denounce the
Educational Situation in the State

After private schools raised their monthly tuition payment 50
sharply that parents started looking for opportunities in public schools,
the Parents and Students Association of Minas Gerais countered that:
"There is not a worthy public school system with enrollment opportunity
for everybody. If one day public schools could improve their quality and
access, private schools could also be an option. Private schools could,
then, charge as much as they wanted" (Estado de Minas, January 2,
1990)

Soon after, the Union of Professionals in Education of Minas
Gerais, well known for their progressive positions, also spoke out against
the optimism of the Municipal Board of Education. Their main argument
was that the commission designated to solve the problem of enrolhnents
in Belo Horizonte had come out with unworkable ideas. According to the
vice-president of the Union of Professionals in Education of Minas

Gerais:

This is a set of impractical ideas: sending students to one school
sometimes 2 kilometers away from their home; transforming
classrooms without rebuilding them properly; overpopulating the
classrooms or creating more school schedules by extending the
number of turns. Those suggestions only degrade and make
worse the conditions of public instruction in Belo Horizonte.
(Estado de Minas, January 17, 1990)

The suggestions presented by the Municipal Board of Education in

the newspaper were seen as incapable of solving the problem of 4,347

'Itr‘

 

69

children whose parents could not ﬁnd room in any public school. In
addition, 33,247 children who were enrolled in the 376 schools of the
state and municipality would have to be placed in buildings without a
suﬁcient inﬁ'astructure: buildings were dilapidated, some buildings had
no light, water, or appropriate sewer. What made things worse was the
diminishing number of hours in the classroom, teachers overloaded with
students and work, and teacher pay at such a low wage that it was

necessary to have 2 or 3 jobs.

Even if taken as optimistic actions, the suggestions described in the
document showed the inertia of the state and mmricipality in providing for
democratic access to schools. Regarding private schools, the newspaper
published on the same day this news: even if students from the public
system were able to pay, there was no room in the private system. For
families leaving the private system there was no room in the public
schools. According to the President of the Federation and Confederation
of Private Schools, the economic crisis had also reached that sector and
many schools had to be closed down. Grants for students from families
with low incomes were unavailable. The State Board of Education could
not come up with a solution. Their conclusions were cold and direct:
"There is no short or long term solution for students who could not get
enrolled in the 249 state schools in the municipality of Belo Horizonte"
(Estado de Minas Gerais, January 17 , 1990). The situation in other cities
at that point might have been better or worse. The state did not have the

ﬁgures and numbers for cities in the interior of the state.

70

The whole state of Minas Gerais had 2.2 million children and
adolescents from 6 to 19 years old, out of school, according to the
newspaper. That number represented almost the total number of
inhabitants of Belo Horizonte, 2.3 million. At the elementary school level
the state had to build 700 schools in order to fulﬁll the demand of 1.1
million children and adolescents who were in the age for compulsory
schooling (7 -14 years old). The compulsory period of schooling in Brazil
(elementary education) has been from lst to 8th grade. Recently in cities
as S50 Paulo one year of pre-school has been added. In Brazil there is a
lower number of public secondary schools compared to public elementary
schools. One reason has to to with the compulsory aspect of elementary
education. The second reason is that the demand for secondary school
tends to be lower because of the unsuccessful school experience in
teaching elementary graders. A third reason is the lack of political desire

of local and federal governments.

On January 21, 1990, the newspaper published: "Only 154 among
1,000 students who enter the state schools in Minas Gerais will graduate
from this elementary schooling period, 88 [a little bit more than 5 percent]
students are able to go through all grades without any failure." The state
schools had 81.13% of students ﬂunking out in this basic period of
schooling because of achievement, with 40. 53% repeaters in ﬁrst grade.

Data on students' achievement were also found in the Centro de
Documentac5o e Informacoes Educacionais (CEDINE) and Pesquisa
Nacional de Amostra Por Domicilios (PNADs) [National Household
Sample Survey], branches of the State Board of Education, and the

71

Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. According to these
institutions, the population of Minas Gerais grew approximately 4% from
1987-1990. In contrast, the public system decreased its enrollment.
Curiously, a close analysis of CEDINE's data from 1990 will show that
even though the private system was assisting only 14.3 percent of the
population in Minas Gerais (10% only in Belo Horizonte), this system
had more buildings than state and municipal schools together - 127
owned by the municipality; 249 by the state; but 400 were owned by the
private system. This conﬁrmed the results of the research on secondary
schools in Minas Gerais coordinated by Maﬁa and Cavalcanti (1992),
which showed that since 1971, private schools had taken advantage of the
Brazilian dictatorship period, and the educational reform of 1971 (Law
5692/71) because the private system was used as a vehicle for the

maintanance of the military regime.

3.3. The Role of the State in Education

The educational debate in the newspaper continued until April of
1990. Some other important aspects need to be highlighted for a better
understanding of the context that brought forward the movement of
Blacks in Belo Horizonte for school curriculum change. Governmental
policies, and especially social policies in education, should be understood
from the perspectives of public versus private sectors, or the struggle

between democracy, capitalism and market economies.

Educational policies, according to Barretto (1994), should be
looked upon and regarded as public policy. That places educational

72

policies among other governmental actions. That also qualiﬁes the
different ways the state distributes resources and services: how fairly
resources are shared, how the state copes with demands for public service
-such as education - and how the state handles the interests of

hegemonic groups.

The deﬁnition of "the state" varies greatly. The best way to
understand its meaning is to ground its deﬁnition in the role the state
plays in a particular society. According to Trouillot:

in Gramsci's view, the state encapsulates 'political society' and
represents the moment of force and coercion, while 'civil society'
is the complex network of educational and ideological
institutions in which leadership is more important than force.
Most of the institutions that exert direct domination are
controlled by the state, whereas civil society encompasses the
bodies and sodalities usually termed 'irrtemal and private.
Between the economic structure and the state with its legislation
and coercion stands civil society'. Political and civil society do
not exist out there, but there actions or things, especially
institutions, that can be said to belong to one or another. Civil
and political society can have the same content. Political society
is the polity (the polis) - that is the society at large, perceived as
an arena where power, the common good, and conﬂicting
interests are always at stake. It is the wider arena wherein the
nexus of coercive institutions (the state in the strictest sense)
reproduces itself. Thus Gramsci comments that 'in actual reality
civil society and state are one and the same'. (1990, p. 19)

In the 19605, most of the Latin America governments faced the
limitations of economic and political models adopted by them. Those

governments were running out of arguments and political discourses for

73

the inefficiency of the economic model adopted. Under the leadership of
the bourgeoisie, those societies reorganized their states on an economic
model, based on private accumulation, and needed the state to guarantee
their beneﬁts (through force and coercion). In order to equalize capital to
the unit of production it was advantageous to this leadership to resist
popular demands, to depress salaries, and disinvest in public housing,
education, and health projects. On top of that they found it necessary to
install military regimes, and a bureaucratic state. Education fell to the

bottom.

This was not unlike a similar scenario in the United States. Labaree
(1988), asserts that: "the American public high school is the product of a
continuing struggle between politics and markets. Or more precisely,
between democracy and capitalism High school was founded to
produce citizens for the new republic but quickly became a vehicle for

individual status attainment." (p. 2)

Yet Brazil, as most Latin American countries, was also different.
The organization of the public school system in western societies has
varied across historical time and social contexts, but all school initiatives
had the intention of generating citizens for their new-bom republics. All
of them somehow had their discourse based on the French liberal
presuppositions: fraternity, liberty, and equality. What happened in
societies like Brazil was that those presuppositions were barely reached
even by a minority, and "individual status attainment" constituted a
privilege for so few people that it generated a perverse and chaotic

educational system, incapable of at least preparing citizens to fulﬁll the

74

necessities of the market system. In the United States, according to
Labaree (1988, p. 3): "Republicanism contributed with a concern for
developing a community of public-spirited citizens, while Protestantism
contributed with a focus on moral education. But at the same time
capitalism provided a concem for utility (practical education) and
meritocracy (the market-based belief in the competitive distribution of
rewards based on individual achievement). " Thus, over time it seems like
public high schools in the United States lost the republican and religious
standpoints that encouraged common-school reform.

The merit principle promoted an intense individual competition

over scarce societal rewards. Although perfectly suited to the

entrepreneurial demands of market capitalism, this competition

was anathema to the development of civic virtue in the new

republic and also to the internalization of community morals. It

reduced political equality to equality of opportunity and public
morals to the sum of private interests."(Labaree 1988, p. 23)

Somehow those standpoints were also lost in Brazil. A distinction
that should be made here is that the creation and administration of
secondary schools were transferred in great proportion to the hands of the
private sector. More than needing the market in educational system to
mediate the relationship between high school and middle class, the middle
and upper-middle classes, representing groups of interests, take over the
state and civil society. Especially by the 19605, as already said in early
paragraphs, the state, through ideology and military coercion, guaranteed
the absoluteness and supremacy of market interests in education. Brazil
constitutes a vivid and contemporary case in which "the credentials
market", is found in the foundation of the interdependency of the school

system and the proprietary middle class. This interdependency has

75

contributed a great deal to the dismal situation of the educational system
in Brazil.

3.4. Board of Education Positions and Decisions to Improve the
Public School System in Minas Gerais

A document written by 9 school principals and other 29 policy
makers and statisticians from the State Board of Education was
distributed to the population through the January 28 edition of the 1990
newspaper. In this document the State Board of Education placed the
responsibility for the failure of public schools on the federal and state of
Minas Gerais governments. Based on data from the Centro de
Documentac5o e Informacoes Educacionais (CEDINE), they pointed to a
dropout rate that reached 80% in elementary school, and a 40% rate of
repeaters in the ﬁrst grade. That document recommended a literacy
program for the decade 1990/2000.

According to information presented in the document, State of Minas
Gerais' schools had structural problems ranging from lack of desks (the
system had a deﬁcit of 700,000 desks), to physical conditions,
administrative procedures, and teacher qualiﬁcations. Teaching methods
were considered archaic. All suggestions to improve schools coming from
progressive sectors of the State Board of Education were ignored by the
government because of bureaucracy and an absence of political desire.

Again, the crucial elements that ensured the failure of the public

76

educational system were teacher preparation, teacher salaries, the

conditions of school buildings and the lack of pedagogical resources.

Besides bad physical and personnel conditions, many public schools
in Minas Gerais assisting poor families had abhorrent school schedules.
Four school sessions for different groups of children rotating in the same
building were divided as follows: from 7:00 am to 11:00 am; 11:00 am to
3:00 pm; 3:00 pm. to 7:00 pm; 7:00 pm. to 10:00 pm. Observe that
the last session was shortened one hour. Teachers had to face an inhuman
schedule and children were not given sufﬁcient opportunity to learn,
especially in the evening sessions. This was one important reason, the

document reported, for literacy failure in public schools.

To try to overcome those realities, a long-term project was created.
It was required by the Constitution of Minas Gerais, following a Federal
regulation which required the creation of a national plan to "eradicate"
illiteracy in Brazil. In 1990 the nrunber of illiterates in Brazil was 36
million; in Minas Gerais 3.2 million. "Literacy Program 1990/2000" was
born. It contained ﬁve axes to eradicate illiteracy in Minas Gerais - Brazil
from 1990-2000.

77

FIVE AXES OF THE PROGRAM TO ERADICATE
ILLITERACY IN MINAS GERAIS-BRAZIL
DECADE 1990/2000

0 TEACHERS- To expand and strengthen Teacher Preparation
Centers: special schedule and full payment for teachers, either involved in
undergraduate, staff development, or graduate studies, when it is necessary to
be absent from his/her classroom; special preparation for adults and
kinde arten teachers.

0 TECHNICAL SUPPORT- To implement technical and scientific
sectors, binding them to universities, in order to produce school texts and
videos, to evaluate curriculum proposals, school books, studies, seminars, to
prepare courses on technology; to give technical assistance to librarians; to
support meetings and pedagogic visits; to support projects of curriculum
enrichment.
o STUDENTS- School autonomy regarding local funding; to get the
community involved in the production of food, in school cooks' training, and
in the creation of new recipes; new health policy for students' access to
h sicians and dentists. I

o INFRA-STRUCTURE- To simplify school norms; to limit the numbers]

of students in classroom; to extend school sessions, and gradually change the

school time from 4 to 8 hours; to amplify the school' 5 space to attend to
rsonnel and students' necessities.

 

  
   

 

 

 

 

 

o DEMOCRATIC ADMINISTRATION- To decentralize school planning,
and teams within school and in the community; to strengthen parents' and
[students' associations.

 

 

 

ti

78

Those were the guidelines expressed in the document and presented
in the newspaper EstadsuleMnasﬂeIais, January 28, 1990. That year
was really an important and strategic moment for change. Brazil had
elected a new president, Mr. Collor de Mello (however two years later
Mr. Mello was overthrown by popular impeachment because of misuse of
public money). In Belo Horizonte the First Political-Pedagogic Congress
organized by the city hall in April of 1990, was attended by 1,500
representatives of teachers, parents, and students of the 127 municipal
schools. They deliberated upon educational strategies organized in a
document of 20 pages. Following Literacy Program 1990/2000, the new
congress aimed to set out long-term procedures for the improvement of
public schools in Belo Horizonte. The municipal schools had already
gone through previous processes in which regional and local meetings
had created basic guidelines for public school democratization, school
organization, quality of schooling, and fair judgment of teachers

performance.

One of the biggest tensions occurred in the criteria for enrolhnent in
the municipal public schools. Some representatives recommended
enrollment based on intellectual selection, but for the majority it was to
be based on sectorialization. Children would be enrolled in the closest
public school to their neighborhood, independent of test scores. Some
educators and parents saw the idea of test scores as a simple matter of
school segregation. Tests had led to the creation of islands of privileges in
the same public educational system. It was known that high test score

schools get better equipment, teachers, and personnel.

79

The Congress Political-Pedagogic listed the following points to
combat the creation of islands of privilege in the same public educational

system, and other educational problems.

FIRST POLITICAL - PEDAGOGIC CONGRESS.
BELO HORIZONTE, CITY HALL- 1990.
MAIN RECOMMENDATIONS

 

* The school will define its internal regime, budget, and political project in
agreement with the school community, through assemblies and direct election of
school principals.
* Power will be on the hands of those in the school committee, which will be
composed of 50% of school personnel, and 50% students and parents. They will
have normative, consultative, and deliberative power.
“ Community forums will deﬁne curriculum and programs in each school.
*The criterion for enrollment will be based on sections of the city, without tests.
This ends the reserve of 25% of enrollments for city hall employees.
* Schools will have authorization to create adult learning programs.
* Schools will not initiate the school year without enough
material and human resources. Delay in the release of school funding will be
paid with interest.
* Schools will elaborate budget plans. They will administer funds and supervise
application through the creation of a deliberative council, elected by schools.
* Municipal schools will not assume responsibilities that belong
to the state.
* Students will have the right to health assistance and lunch, complemented
with school own vegetable gardens.
* Schools will decide on personnel necessities. A minimum
number of professionals will be designed to each school.
* Except in cases of emergency, teachers should not teach

in more than one school session.
* Salaries should be deﬁned by the assembly of teachers in their union
organizations.
" Constructing and increasing school buildings will be according to
the pedagogic model adopted in each school. This construction

should guarantee space for a library, laboratories, and a workshop room.
* Members of the school and municipal government will verify the
implementation of decisions approved by law in Belo Horizonte city.

 

 

 

80

In comparing both documents it becomes clear that the ﬁrst one,
Literacy Program 1990/2000, has a very technical characteristic, and the
second one, First Political-Pedagogic Congress, has a more political
proﬁle. In many aspects they represent the same concerns, for instance
schools and teachers' autonomy, extending the permanence of children in
school, having a good infra-structure able to fulﬁll students and personnel
necessities, students having food at school, etc. The second project was
severely criticized and generated much more conﬂict. One of the main
reasons is that, First Congress Political-Pedagogic represented a historical
moment in which public schools were challenged in their most core
aspects: as institutions organized as places to share and produce
knowledge. Both projects represented a concept of education and school
cuniculum modern and advanced to that political context because of the
structural reform they were demanding. Their recommendations were
extremely necessary, and if put in practice both projects would be the
start point for structural change in the educational system in Belo

Horizonte.

Thus, Belo Horizonte began a crucial battle against poor education.
in 1990. However, the major issues missing in that process concerned
race and culture. Black leaders, the majority of them educators (as the
interviews will show in the following chapter), came to realize that
Aﬁican—Brazilian issues played a determinant role in the process of
critiquing school conditions, and the production of knowledge in schools.
When Black leaders entered the picture, Belo Horizonte started a third
chapter in that process. Nothing on the Black Movement was found in

the newspaper during 1990. That should not surprise anyone. The

81

newspaper was interested in covering what the mainstream society, for
one reason or another, was interested in knowing. Belo Horizonte, as well
most of the cities in Brazil, does not have a press coordinated by, owned
by, or directly interested in Aﬁican—Brazilian issues. But as an
interviewee said, they found out that Black children were receiving the
heaviest burden in the educational "chaos" reported in the newspaper and
addressed in official reform docmnents. In the newspapers there is no
indication that Blacks and Whites were receiving differential treatment.
However, those Black educators and leaders of the Black community had
enough empirical, statistic, and theoretical bases to act on their own

understanding of the "reported" reality.

In the next chapter, interviews with leaders of the movement for
cuniculum change in Belo Horizonte, and analysis of documents written
by them, will provide another way of approaching that same political
moment. Through the lenses of Aﬁican-Brazilians new elements will
appear to shape our understanding of the educational situation in Belo

Horizonte.

82

CHAPTER IV

BELO HORIZONTE CITY AND THE BLACK
ORGANIZATION S' DEMANDS FOR SCHOOL CURRICULUM
CHANGE
IN THE 19905

83

4. Race and Education in Belo Horizonte

After the end of the dictatorship period in Brazil (1964-197 8),
social movements for democratization spawned a number of Black
organizations. These Black organizations developed demands for better
school curricula through organized meetings, conferences and projects.
Many educational researchers, experts, and professionals, whether they
belonged to the Black movement or not, participated in transforming
those demands into proposals aiming to end racial discrimination in
schools. Texts in use were ﬁlled with sexist and racist discourses in their
depiction of Blacks, women, and native Brazilians. In contrast to report in
the newspapers, the Black organizations in Belo Horizonte found the
existing school curriculum characterized by reinforcing racial
discrirrrination in Brazilian society. Several important meetings led to the
formatting of a commission constituted of leaders of the three main Black
organizations in Belo Horizonte. This commission organized the platform
for cuniculum change presented to the Belo Horizonte Municipal Board
of Education, in 1990. It is important to underscore that this platform
organized in Belo Horizonte in early 19905 is part of a broader movement

for racial justice in schools and in the Brazilian society.

In the middle 19805, the Carlos Chagas Foundation investigated the
conditions of the Aﬁican—Brazilian connnurrity living in the state of S50
Paulo. In 1985, the "First National Meeting about the Reality of Blacks
and Education" was held in Porto Alegre. In 1986, the Aﬁican-Brazilian
Community Participation and Development Council, together with the

Carlos Chagas Foundation, organized a national conference to discuss the

84

issue of "Black People and Education." The sixth and seventh meetings of
the "Northern and Northeastern Aﬁican-Brazilians", was held in Aracajr’r
in 1986, and Recife 1988, respectively. These meetings discussed the
issue of discrimination and education. In 1987, the School of Education
of the Federal University of Minas Gerais, and the J 050 Pinheiro Human
Resources Institute, organized a national conference to discuss
"Education and Discrimination against Blacks." Also, in Belo Horizonte,
a project called "Racism in Schools" was conducted by a group of
researchers sponsored by the National Council of Scientiﬁc and
Technological Development (CNPq). Finally, in 1990, the Commission
for the Elimination of Racism in the Municipal Schools of Belo Horizonte
was created. Later this commission came to be called Citizenship and

Afro-Brazilian Culture in Mrmicipal Schools in Belo Horizonte.

Two important aspect that emerge from all those events are issues
of identity and Black culture. The fostering of Black children's identity
was seen as interwoven with the valorization of Afro-Brazilian's historical
roots, the eradication of racial stereotypes in instructional materials,
teacher's performance in classroom, and relationships between students
and school personnel (Pinto, 1993a). According to this same author from

those events also emerged the necessity for:

the introduction of Aﬁican studies in elementary and high
schools; the creation of groups of study in Municipal and State
Boards of Education about Black culture and Afro religious
manisfestations within the Brazilian society; the creation of
centers of Black culture in schools; the inclusion of the 20th of
November (considered by the Black movement a national day
for Black consciousness and struggle, this is the date in which

85

Zumbi of Palmares, a Black leader of the seventeenth century,
was assassinated after the destruction of the runaway slave
community of which he was the leader) in the school calendar;
the revision of Brazilian history by historians committed with
Black issues; the revision of the literature written by Afro-
Brazilians. (p. 36)

In Belo Horizonte, the process of organizing the platform for
curriculum change, and a research project called "Racism in Schools"
provided much information on the state of education with respect to race.
For example, one important discovery of the "Racism in Schools" project
involved unfair selection criteria. According to the data found in this
project, children were selected for a particular school and/or program
based on their social class. Some schools had only children from the
middle class. Others were designed to teach those from the working class.
When a school received a population that was heterogeneous, the
homogenization occurred either through class schedule or tracking
students according to their social class and race. One of the members of

the commission conﬁrmed this report:

At the very beginning of the [9905 it came to my knowledge that
a huge number of Black children in Belo Horizonte at the
municipal public schools were being treated badly. We had
class starting at 9:00 pm. attended by children only 9, 10, and
11 years old. It was not because those children were working or
something like that. The reason was that suddenly the municipal
public schools had a "boom " because the price of keeping
children in private schools increased so sharply that low middle
class families (the majority White), could not aﬂord to pay.
Black children were sent to dirty and crowded classrooms, hot
and without fresh air. The Municipal secretary scheduled 4
school sessions. The first session during the morning was
mainly reserved for only White kids. (Maria)

86

In the newspapers there was no indication that this kind of extreme
marginalization occurred. What was reported was that those schools
located in the periphery of Belo Horizonte or interior of the State of
Minas Gerais received fewer beneﬁts. Resources were allocated
according to administrators' relations with political parties and politicians.
There was a clear social class-based bifurcation between high school-
goers and non-high school goers. In that bifurcation it was not evident
that race was also a critical variable in distinguishing between the two
groups. Later that difference also appears between vocational and

academic preparation.

The results of these meetings and project in Belo Horizonte was
that Black organizations had information enough to challenge the State

and Mimicipal government on discriminatory educational practices. Casa

Dandara was the precursor of the WW
Eelajhminagmamsmmnasﬁsmmmﬂpais (the preliminary
document which gave birth to the Commission Against Racism in Belo
Horizonte Public Schools), although several organizations were also
involved. This document was the guideline in the process of demanding
school curricrrlum changes in Belo Horizonte. What follows is a brief
description of the origins, goals, and constituency of the three
organizations involved in the movement for curriculum change in Belo
Horizonte: Associac5o Nacional Casa Dandara (National Association
House of Dandara), Agentes de Pastoral Negros, or APNs (Black
Pastoral Agents), and Movimento Negro Uniﬁcado, or MNU (Black
Uniﬁed Movement).

87

4.1. The Movement for Curriculum Change In Belo Horizonte: the
Participating Groups

0 Associacao Nacional Casa Dandara

In August of 1990, Casa Dandara (one of the Black organizations
leading the movement for curriculum change in Belo Horizonte),
presented to the Municipal Board of Education a plan for eliminating
racism in the municipal schools of Belo Horizonte‘. They charged that
schools were "reproducers of racist ideologies." Schools were accused of
failing in their mission to educate and prepare students for citizenship.
Statistics showed dismal school outcomes in terms of teaching and

learning for working class and Black students in Belo Horizonte.

For general objectives, the activists of Casa Dandara asked that
racial issues in school be brought in line with the municipal law of Belo
Horizonte. They also underscored the necessity of developing a new
pedagogical projects to take Aﬁican-Brazilian students' backgrounds into
account in order to combat systematically racist practices in school. The
speciﬁc objectives were (1) to review the curriculum and instructional
materials; (2) to update the preparation of teachers and other
professionals in education; and (3) to discuss the implementation of

instruments able to transform social relations in school.

 

1Associac5o Nacional Casa Dandara (1990). Ante-projeto de criac50 da Comiss50 Pela eliminac5o
do Racismo nas Escolas Municipais (Comiss50 Anti-racismo). Belo Horizonte.

88

According to the docmnent presented to the municipal board of
education, the idea of creating an organization such as Casa Dandara
started in 1986. According to Casa Dandara members, after reading
W, by Florestan Femandes --
cited earlier as a classic reference for understanding of racial relations in
Brazil - they came to realize once again that it was necessary to create
organizations with a strong structure to intervene in the discrimination
against Blacks. Blacks held an absolute majority in terms of incarceration
(prisons and mental hospitals), homelessness, sickness, illiteracy, and

police violence.

Casa Dandara's members advocated what they called a "modern
way of doing politics." The most common understanding of politics had
been to eliminate beauty, passion, pleasure, and amusement. In order to
attract Blacks living in poor conditions, they saw the need to create
spaces for social assistance and cultural activities. Thus in 1990, Casa
Dandara had the following projects/activities:

- Days for study: Lectures on cultural, historical, and conjectural
subjects.

-- Poster/calendar: poster with Black models informing both dates and
important ﬁgures on the history of Blacks in Brazil and in the world;

- Children of Dandara: socio-cultural and pedagogical work with
children ﬁom low income families;

- Research: research into interracial marriage in Brazil; and

- Project Citizenship and Afro-Brazilian Culture in Belo Horizonte's
public schools: work with the Municipal Board of Education.

89

o Agentes de Pastoral Negros (APNs)

This organization is religious in nature. The Agentes de Pastoral
Negros started within the Catholic church structure in 19832. Though the
origins of this organization go back to 1978, when secular priests,
members of religious orders, and seminarists decided to organize a
meeting to discuss the reality of Blacks within the Catholic Church. Their
main motivation involved Black people in religious life: liturgy,
ecumenism, catechisms, sacerdotal preparation, religious formation, and

spirituality.

This group began with a national proﬁle since the Catholic Church
has followers, welfare institutions, schools, hospitals, and social centers
with a variety of activities all over the country. In reading the document
that traces the history of the APNs since its foundation up to until 1993,
some concerns (they do not call it a political platform) emerged and can
be synthesized in the following way:

-- To organize groups of study and action in different states;

- To contact other existent groups: religious, political, cultural, and
possibly to join them;

-- To motivate Black leadership in the community and in pastoral action;
-— To contact Aﬁican peoples living in Brazil for integration and cultural
exchange;

- To lead Blacks to accept their identity;

 

2Agentes dc Pastoral Negros: origem, historia e organizac50 (1993).

9O

-- To unify Blacks in actions for the liberation of their brothers,
independent of their religious and political ideologies;

-- To unify the struggle of Blacks with the struggle of women, indigenous
peoples, workers, and peasants ; and

-- To avoid separatist actions. They want to join side-by-side with other

groups who also wanted the emancipation of oppressed people.

The Agentes of Pastoral Negros identify themselves as those who
are engaged, from a religious standpoint, in grass roots work with the
Black community. Their members claim that their faith in God, a liberator
God, motivates them to build solidarity and to suffer with those who are
hungry, discriminated against, and racially segregated. They use the term

Quilombo3 to identify their national headquarters.

o Movimento Negro Uniﬁcado (MNU)

The Movimento Negro Uniﬁcado emerged in 197 8. It was an
organization autonomous from religious beliefs, political parties, labor
unions, and culturalist4 perspectives. Originally called Movimento Negro
Uniﬁcado Contra a Discriminac5o Racial (Black Uniﬁed Movement

 

3Quilombo was a political and social organization of runaway slaves. The most well known and
important was located in the State of Alagoas (Northeast Brazil), and was called Quilombo de
Palmares. From 1601 to 1694, Quilombo dc Palmares constituted one of the most strong and
sophisticated organizations of Afro-Brazilians in the Brazilian history. That society, ruled by Blacks,
held approximately twenty thousand runaways slaves. In 1694, Palmares was defeated by
mercenaries sponsored by the Portuguese Crown. In order to destroy Palmares it was required more
military effort than that used in the battle against Dutch settlers in the Northeastern region of Brazil.
4 Classiﬁed as culturalists are those Black activities or initiatives which bring culture as the basic
differentiator of Blacks and others without also conceiving culture as a political instrument for
empowerment and consciousness raising. See "Movemento Negro Uniﬁcado: 1978-1988. 10 anos dc
luta contra a racismo (1988).

91

Against Racial Discrimination), this Black organization aims to combat

discrimination through political struggle in Brazil.

The creation of this organization represented a wealth of experience
of Black activists who had fought against the military regime, and made
attempts, even during the dictatorship period, to create spaces for Black
consciousness raising and organizing. In 197 8, this Black organization
made its politics public to the Brazilian society. The torture and murder of
a Black taxi driver by the police in S50 Paulo was the "fuse", at a
strategic political moment, to organize a public demonstration. In
Downtown S50 Paulo, during a public demonstration in front of the
municipal theater on July 7, 1978, Movimento Negro Uniﬁcado Contra a
Discriminac5o Racial (MNUCDR) was created. One of the most
important protests in the contemporary history of Afro-Brazilians, the
original idea was to have a uniﬁed national movement of Blacks. That
idea did not come true because of a divergence that split the movement,
and at the same time promoted the creation of other Black organizations.
The manifesto read on the steps of the municipal theater in downtown
S50 Paulo contains that unifying purpose, and at the same time
synthesizes the political agenda of the Movimento Negro Uniﬁcado:

Today we are in the street in a campaign of denouncementl A
campaign against racial discrimination, against police repression,
underemployment and marginalization. We are in the street to
denounce the very poor quality of life of the Black community. . ..
This movement must have as its basic principle work to
permanently denounce all acts of racial discrimination, the
constant organization of the Community in order to confront
whatever type of racism... For this reason we propose the
creation of CENTERS OF STRUGGLE OF THE UNIFIED BLACK

92

MOVEMENT AGAINST RACIAL DISCRIMINATION in the
neighborhoods, towns, prisons, lands of Candomble, our lands of
Umbanda, in the workplace, in the samba schools, the churches,
everywhere black people live: CENTER OF STRUGGLE that will
promote debate, information, consciousness raising and
organizing of the black community. We invite the democratic
sectors of society that support us, to create the necessary
conditions for a truthful racial democracy. (Hanchard 1994, p.
125)

4.2. The Movement for Curriculum Change in Belo Horizonte:

Tensions Among the Groups

As demonstrated above, Casa Dandara was the only Black
organization in the movement for cruriculum change that did not have a
national structure, with bases in different states. This organization started
in Belo Horizonte addressing issues concerning the city's social and racial
context. These facts, perhaps, can explain Casa Dandara's ﬁrst move
toward the starting of the Movement for curriculum change. However,
MNU and APN felt somehow betrayed, isolated, disrespected in the
process of writing documents and in discussions with the board of
education. The lack of solidarity among those Afro-Brazilian activists is
expressed by the majority of interviews when evaluating the weaknesses
and negative points in the process of writing the platform for curriculum
and having meetings with the Municipal Board of Education. As an

interviewee asserted:

What happened in Belo Horizonte during the 19905 was that
Casa Dandara felt isolated and needed other supporters. That
movement for curriculum change ended up being a experience
of Casa Dandara. It was not a movement belonging to all of us
Black militants. (Severino)

93

By the same token Casa Dandara's president also complained about lack
of solidarity:
One negative aspect is our fragile capacity to organize strong
Black political organizations. Our incapacity in building
coalitions among us (Black organizations) without

disrespecting each other... Our lack of mobilization and
organization. (Raim unda)

A representative of Agentes de Pastoral Negros had a more holistic view
of the problem. She believed that personal and political difﬁculties
complicated the structural situations that were eroding the process of

writing the platform for curricultnn change.

I believe we had no political basis to ﬁght with the State. 0n the
top of that, we did not reach a consensus regarding the process
of writing the platform for curriculum change in Belo
Horizonte. First of all, we should become more conscious of
what has happened before. When we got together to write the
proposal, we did not have a history of what had happened in
1986, 1987 because it was not valued by those who were
struggling for racial justice in education in 1990, 1991. We
must have political force in order to be listened by the State. We
need a movement of social groups, and we have to be more
conscious of our history. (Clementina)

Hanchard (1994), in discussing the issue of racial politics and the
Black movement in Brazil, presents a very interesting way of approaching
and theorizing about the way solidarity is built among Black activists. His
analysis is based on the notion of resemblance. In conceptualizing racial
consciousness, Hanchard identiﬁes three forms of solidarity and ethnic
identiﬁcation: faint, mixture of faint and strong, and strong resemblance.
The former is characterized as a form of solidarity that is more intuitive,

and based on the sense of belonging to a common history and origin. Less

94

complex than the other two forms of solidarity, faint resemblance is a
more emotional and personal form of solidarity, and the ﬁrst step toward
strong actions of solidarity and political action. "What distinguishes the
strong resemblance from weak ones is an ability to override particular
differences within a social collectivity for concrete political goals,
however temporal. Political differences are temporarily repressed,
ﬁssures de-emphasized, in favor of uniﬁcation" (Hanchard 1994, p. 81).
That movement for curriculum change in Belo Horizonte oscillated
between strong and faint resemblance. What brought those leaders
together was a common sense of the urgent necessity of making schools a

better place for Afro-Brazilian and working class children.

Leaders of Black organizations in Belo Horizonte were able to
overcome some differences, but they did not go far enough to build up a
coalition among them, with other non-governmental organizations, and
consequently with the municipal and state boards of education. Some of
them realized that

We have presented a demand for curriculum change without a
resonance in the Black community. It was one of our
weaknesses. We, Black leaders, should make stronger our
capacity to deepen our resonance in the Black community.
(Conceicao)

and also that

One has to have more than thoughts to write down a proposal.
It is necessary to deﬁne interlocutors we trust, and that have
the competence to lead the project. We should had called the
organized sectors of society to discuss the process
(neighborhood associations, women 's organizations, other

95

Black organizations , ecological movements, and so on... ).
(Sebastia'o)

Each member, as noticed during the interviews, represented a different
vision of the Commission "Citizenship and Afro-Brazilian Culture in Belo
Horizonte' Municipal Schools," and talked mostly about personal
experiences with education and curriculum, not from a common ground
that might have been expected to come from that process. This fact does
not diminish the richness of the very important issues they raised during
the interviews, though it might help to make sense of the context. The
following are the key points presented to the Municipal Board. The data
gathered through the interviews revealed that even in the face of many
limitations, the Commission on "Citizenship and Afro-Brazilian Culture in
the Mrmicipal School" made important contributions to the Municipal

Board of Education in Belo Horizonte.

These key points address what the Commission "Citizenship and
Afro-Brazilian Culture in Belo Horizonte' Municipal Schools" judged as
the most urgent and necessary changes in the educational system.

Strategically these constituted their objectives.

96

 

OBJECTIVES OF THE COMMISSION FOR "CITIZEN SHIP AND AFRO-

BRAZILIAN CULTURE IN BELO HORIZONTE' MUNICIPAL SCHOOLS"

* To contribute in the creation of a new school. To combat all kinds of racism
and discrimination that have immded the exercise of citizenship.

 

* To combat in the school system the reproduction of stereotypes and negative
images associated with Blacks and/or their color.

* To approach in the school system and community the issue of race, in order to
promote consciousness-raising around this issue.

* To build up a new pedagogical project avoiding ethnocentric assumptions.
This new pedagogical project must respect the multi-racial and plural aspects of1
the Brazilian society, and recognize Black people's participation in the civilizing
process of the Brazilian nation.

* To program and conduct training and courses for teachers, educationalr
administrators, and specialists.

* To revise critically the content of school books in all disciplines, suggesting
possible alterations, or their replacement.

 

* To promote events and debates about instructional materials, in order to
review and if necessary to modify values and concepts regarding the image 0
Blacks in the Brazilian society.

* To help in the publication of instructional materials about African history and
the cultural heritage of African Brazilians, according to the necessities 0
teachers.

* To promote debates between the Municipal Board of Education and Black
ﬂanizations in order to foster common strategies to combat racism in schools.

 

 

 

97

4.2.1. Who were the Interviewees?

A total of 9 interviewees (1 White male and 8 Afro-Brazilians, 6
women and 3 men) constituted the participants/respondents in the
interviews. To conduct the interviews, it was not necessary to make a
special selection among Black organization leaders. These nine had been
previously chosen within their organizations to be the representatives for
public discussions of issues of curriculum change and racial justice in
education. Each organization had two representatives in the Commission.
The coordinator of each organization was also interviewed in order to get

a better sense of the objectives of each organization.

Throughout this paper those who have been called leaders of the
Black community will be identiﬁed by pseudonyms. What follows is a
brief description of the roles played by each of them in the process of
writing the platform for curriculum change. The order of presentation

herein will follow the sequence in which the interviews were conducted.

a 1) Maria (female) is 27 years old. She was the representative of
Casa Dandara. She had no children but was an elementary teacher in the
Municipal Public system. She became interested in race and school
curriculum when she started teaching under the constructivist method in a
kindergarten her mother used to run. Her role in the process was to bring
to the Commission concrete situations she was facing in schools, or was
aware of. During the process of writing the platform and having meetings
with the Municipal Board of Education, she seemed to be very helpful

98

because educational policy makers were looking for concrete cases of

discrimination against Black and adolescent children in public schools.

0 2) Jo5o (White male) was 39 years old, an informal member of
Casa Dandara and a researcher in this same organization. He had 2 White
children, one of whom was in school. His interest in the school
curriculum started when he began his work on the staff of Casa Dandara.
He is a teacher of elementary and secondary schools, and was ﬁnishing a
Master's program in history. His belief in the importance of curriculum
change was inﬂuenced by his presence in the Black movement and
discussions regarding school content. He believed there were few
professionals in the educational ﬁeld committed to racial justice in
education. After ﬁghting against the military regime he came to
understand that the main problem in Brazilian society was a racial matter.
To solve Brazilian social problems, therefore, racial inequalities had to be
addressed. His main contribution came through the process of writing the

platform for curriculum change.

0 3) Sebasti5o (male) was 38 years old. A representative of MNU,
he had two children in school who were facing dramatic consequences of
racist attitudes. He was a psychologist working for a governmental
agency which prepared educators. He began a serious interest in race and
curriculum while coordinating a project with poor and Black children in
inner-cities. He claims that he educated himself in the Black movement
even though he had gone to college. Because of his professional
experience he could contribute a great deal to the discussions between the

Commission and the Municipal Board of Education.

99

o 4) Sebastiana (female) was 31 years old and Coordinator of APNs
in Belo Horizonte. She had no children in school. She worked as a
secretary for the APNs. After joining the Black movement, issues of
education and curriculum became important elements to her. As a
coordinator of the APNs she had helped to organize activities on race and
education, and had been involved in alternative projects of education in
the Black community. For example, she helped organize, as an informal
educator, literacy and cultural programs for Black children during
weekends. Druing the discussions of the Commission she was interested
in understanding how the project could be more effective. She wanted to
continue the discussion even without the support of the Municipal Board
of Education. According to her, APNs originated the idea of building a
pedagogical center for Black children.

a 5) Severino (male) was 39 years old and the coordinator of the
MNU in Belo Horizonte. He had no children in school. He worked for the
Municipal Secretariat of Culture. According to him, MNU always took
education as an important element to work upon in order to minimize the
sequels racism leaves in people's lives. Public schools were not seen as
good and appropriate places for Black children--especially children in the
period of emotional formation. He calls himself a militant of the Black
movement interested in build a political project for Blacks in the Brazilian

society.

o 6) Clementina (female) was 28 years old. A representative of
APNs, she had no children and worked as an educational supervisor. She

started being interested in racial issues and cmriculum after completing

100

her teacher preparation course, and started teaching in public school. She
believed the school curriculum was not appropriate to teach Black and
working class children. As an educational supervisor her role in the
Commission was very important because she had experience with

educational administration.

a 7) Raimunda (female) was 48 years old. She had a daughter in
school who was having a difficult experience because of racism. As a
coordinator of Casa Dandara and a Black organizer, she believed Black
leaders had to become aware of what was going on in the Black
community, addressing important issues for this same community.
Developing such awareness was the main reason that Casa Dandara
became the precursor of the Commission for Curriculum Change. She
believed that rnicrolevel actions could disrupt the structure of society. Her
presence in the Commission was important in the dialogue with the
Municipal Board of Education because of her political experience as a

Black leader and community organizer.

e 8) Conceic5o (female) was 30 years old. She was the
representative of APNs. As a teacher of elementary school students she
started connecting racism and children falling behind in school when she
joined that Black organization. According to her, race is approached in
school in a very folldoric way. In the Commission she was interested in
combating how racism operates in schools especially through
instructional materials. In the APNs she was also involved in alternative
projects of education with Black children in the Catholic Church during
the weekends.

101

o 9) Catarina (female), at 26 years old, was the representative of the
MNU. A teacher of elementary grades she believed that to combat racism
in school more than just a commission was necessary. It would be
necessary to create informal groups to continue discussions about racism
in each public school in Belo Horizonte. Also an activist in the teachers'
union, her main contribution was in making the work of the Commission

known to other progressive sectors of Belo Horizonte civil society.

The following sections discuss the themes that emerged from the
process of creating the platform for curriculrun change in Belo Horizonte,
as captured through the interviews. They include discussion of (1) the
role of education in multiracial societies with developing econorrries, (2)
race and culture in the school curriculum, (3) the necessity of teacher
education improvement, and (4) the necessity of school reconstruction

and racial justice in education.

4.3. The Role of Education in Multiracial Societies with Developing

Economies

Regarding racial issues, we are doing poorly in both
educational systems. The private school is a lost case in this
century. In the public schools, because of their characteristics -
- they are a sector of the Brazilian state --, we can see more
possibilities of introducing racial issues. (Raimunda)

We faced a problem regarding the number of children that
could be enrolled in the public educational system. In this case
I would say that it is not only Blacks that faced and are still
facing problems. Whites from the working class also got in

102

trouble. The public educational system as a whole needs
revision. (Sebastia'o)

As already pointed out in an earlier chapter, the educational system
in Belo Horizonte was in chaos. There were islands of excellence in
which the middle and upper-middle classes, connected or not to different
Christian denominations, could guarantee to their offspring and new
generations a very good education. To the majority of the population
what was left is something that is also called "school", but is far away

from what a school should be.

The school cuniculum in societies like Brazil is characterized by
hierarchically framed bodies of knowledge. Students are organized in a
tracking system that functions according to the speciﬁc kind of school to
which children are assigned. The kind of school students attend during
the 8 years of basic schooling will determine the continuation of their
school journey, and what kind of secondary school they will get. In
Brazil, there are four main branches of secondary school preparation
(what in the US is called high school): academic, scientiﬁc, technical, and
professional/vocational. These institutions differ in characteristics based
on their nature (public or private), as well as on their geographical and

social contexts:

There are academic schools that prepare students to compete for
entrance in prestigious ﬁelds to prestigious universities or colleges. It is
worthwhile to mention here that in Brazil, unlike in the United States, all

federal and state universities are totally maintained with public revenues.

103

With the exception of the Catholic University in S50 Paulo and Rio de

Janeiro, public universities are also the most prestigious ones.

Then there are secondary schools that offer technical instruction,
preparing students from the working class and middle class to become
skilled workers in industry and in the business arena. These students
come from White and Afro-Brazilian racial backgrounds. The preparation
here tends to be better than that received in the vocational/professional

schools (see below).

Some secondary schools give scientiﬁc and technological
preparation. Usually, only those students who had a very good basic
preparation in elementary school can get in. These are typically middle

and upper-middle class students.

Finally, there are those secondary schools which are known as
vocational/professional. These are the secondary schools in which some
students are prepared to teach children from lst to 4th grades (in
Portuguese these programs are called Curso Normal), while other
students learn basic elements of chemistry, book keeping, secretarial, and
nursing skills. After a year of basic studies, the students enrolled in these
programs must choose one course of specialization. This constitutes one
of the most ambiguous areas of secondary school study. Usually after
three or four years attending those schools, these supposedly well
prepared workers, have a hard time ﬁnding a job. They end up
performing tasks in the work place that have nothing to do with what they

 

 

104

originally were prepared for. They hold a secondary school diploma that

has a very low practical value in the work place.

The majority of students who are allocated to the last category are
Blacks and working-class students. A majority of women who go to these
schools become teachers of elementary grades (1 st to 4th). In contrast
the academic secondary schools have a majority of Whites and Japanese
(it is worthwhile to mention that Brazil has one of the largest number of
Japanese pe0ple outside Japan) primarily from the middle and upper-
middle classes. Blacks hardly ever attend academic or scientiﬁc
secondary schools.

This brief description of the educational system in Brazil can give to
the reader a better idea of the educational context in which Black leaders
were demanding school curriculum reform. They were very conscious of
the structural problems surrounding their cuniculum change platform, and
how structural problems could jeopardize the success of their endeavor.
For those Black leaders, the public schools were their main target
because of the concentration of Blacks in that system, especially in the
basic 8-year period of schooling, and because of the ftmction of public

schools as an occupational determinant.

We ﬁnd only a handful of Blacks holding important positions in
the government and private initiatives. The cultural
contributions of Blacks are enormous, but there is a lack of
Blacks in the scientiﬁc ﬁeld. Racism works to exclude Afro-
Brazilians. The society sees us as inferior. There is an
expectancy regarding our people that nothing is going to work.
The educational chances that were given to us excluded us.
There is a signiﬁcant number of Blacks that have been

105

prevented from getting any beneﬁt. It is a lost generation. There
is no way of repairing the disadvantages for Blacks in a short
period of time. (Sebastiao)

The interviewees captured in a very precise way what has been
discussed in different sectors of the Brazilian society. In the Brazilian
Congress, democratic Federal Deputies and educators, such as Florestan
Fernandes, have denounced educational injustices that for decades have
plagued Brazilian society. More than creating a dual system, the interests
of private groups and the negligence of the government have generated in
the Brazilian society an educational chaos in which the democratic-
republican goal of education for all citizens has been lost in the

transformation of schooling into merchandise (Fernandes, 1989).

The challenge for these Black leaders was to deﬁne the role of
education in multiracial societies when educational inequalities were so

strong.

The role of education in multiracial societies, or more precisely in
Brazil, can be better determined through understanding the standpoint5 of
the racial groups that constitute the school population. Herein the notion
of understanding has an anthropological meaning. As Singer (1993)
asserts in the syllabus of his course: "understanding should be seen as far
more than tolerance, appreciation, or even respect." Based on this notion

of understanding, the discussion of the role of education receives a new

 

5 Standpoint diﬁers from the idea of perspective. Standpoint is something lived or achieved
Knowledge and consciousness within the idea of standpoint are socially constructed, and emerge in
the place one is located This discussion can be found in Patricia Hill Collins' book BladLEsminist

Ihrmsht (1993)

106

dimension. In order to grasp the meaning of education in multiracial
societies, the standpoints of those socially located based on their race
(inherited traits), ethnicity (social and cultural characteristics)6, social
class, and gender - in our case Blacks/Afro-Brazilians, men and women
ﬁom the working class - should be skeptically and closely analyzed.
The whole idea is that in the culture or lived experience (Apple, 1988) of
those excluded of the mainstream society one can ﬁnd ways of

overcoming social and racial inequalities.

What makes possible the overcoming of racial and social
inequalities experienced by those oppressed by unequal structures is the
recognition that those excluded from the mainstream society embody
their own culture as well as the culture of those holding political power,
controlling the media, the schools, etc ..... (remember that in almost all
multiracial societies Whites are still holding political, educational,
religious, and economic power). This dynamic oppressor/oppressed
consciousness makes the struggle less difficult to those marginalized
groups excluded from the mainstream society. In contrast, those
privileged in the mainstream society can only see their own culture and
values. A good example of this contrast can be found in the school
curriculum: those from the working class and non-White must know both
the school culture that mainly reﬂects the mainstream values, as well as

their own cultures as racial, ethnic, and social groups.

 

6 Race as a social construction, as expressed by Howard Winant in his book Racialmndiﬂons
(1994), is used to refer to a group of people with common ancestry and genetically transmitted
physical characteristics. Ethnicity refers to groups of people sharing the same sense of peoplehood
because of cultural backgrounds as religion, ancestry, national origin or language.

107

Not only the school content must change; also respect toward
diﬂerences should be enforced, but not as a deviation. It must
be a commitment of the school with an issue that should be
worked out in the community --family, neighborhood
association, churches, etc.... The school should use the
principle of difference. (Sebastiana)

It is necessary to start understanding the real children we
have. We must recognize that children are not equal. We need a
positive discriminatory education. It is necessary this
discrimination, the understanding of diﬂerences in order to
build the equality. (Sebastiao)

Through the points presented in the remarks above it is possible to

advance the notion and practice of equality in education. Based on the

opinions and experience of these Black leaders, it is possible to learn

how, on a daily basis, multiracial relations and democratic perspectives in

education can be enhanced. According to this view, the role of education

in multiracial societies has to be established in resonance with the

different cultural groups that make up a society. Yet, schools must

inevitably be open to social and cultural manifestations that occur outside

of the school arena. Students on a daily basis bring to school those

cultural manifestations, in different forms, and yet constantly those

expressions are overlooked, neglected, or appropriated in a folkloric and

pejorative way.

Schools should be more than just a place to learn how to read
and write. The school should take care of students in a more
integrative way. (Catarina)

Diﬂerences seem to be hidden and pulsating at the same time.
The neglecting of other races is not explicit. If you ask the

108

teachers and/or school administrators how racial
discrimination against Blacks manifests itself in school, the
answer probably is that there is no discrimination against
Blacks. That it does not exist. (10670)

The role of schools was visualized, by those interviewed, in a very
holistic way. Schools should take an integrative approach that recognizes
and embraces individual and social differences, race and ethnic
backgrounds. Racism and sexism must be strongly combated. Neglecting
of this core aspect in teaching and learning leads to simply token
educational initiatives, disguised in great battles and crusades against
illiteracy, very expensive programs to improve student performance, and
educational amendments that do not reﬂect contemporary educational

needs.

The internal dynamics of schools in multiracial societies are not
easy to understand and handle. Different actors are involved, and their
interests tend to move in opposite directions. It seems as if it is possible
to unify these interests in movements for social change if the actors

involved use the strategy suggested by McCarthy:

Radical educators must struggle with and not for the socially
disadvantaged; minority men must engage with the problem of
minority women, and working-class organizations must struggle
with the problems of racism and sexism. Racial inequality in
education cannot be separated from this broad range of issues. It
must be remembered that inequality in education for black youth
has historically been associated with inequality of opportunity
and unequal futures in virtually all other spheres of social,
economic and political life. (1990, p. 122)

109

This kind of political alliance presented above has been strategically
used by progressive educators, and community organizers in search for
social and racial justice in society and in education. Another important
aspect in discussing equity in education in multiracial societies is to
underscore what has been already pointed out by McCarthy and
Crichlow (1993). For earlier neo-marxist authors, racial inequalities
constitute merely a contradiction that would be overcome with the defeat
of the capitalist system. Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976) have
written a classic example. Even more recent neo-marxist authors still
believe in class divisions and their contradictions as the best explanation

for racial antagonisms.

In discussing race and culture in the school curriculum, the
interviewees also presented aspects of their experience as Afro-
Brazilians, leaders of the Black Movement, and educators (in the broad
sense). Together they constitute an excellent standpoint for understanding

practices and theories that produce racism in the Brazilian society.

4.4. Race and Culture in the School Curriculum

The experience of my daughter has been dramatic. One of the
factors is the racism. She was attending an elite school in Belo
Horizonte, but she had no strategies to handle the situation. She
used to be very shy. She would not open her mouth. She was
called nicknames that denigrated her race. The school blamed
her. They suggested me take her to a psychologist. The society
tells us that we Blacks have less opportunity because we are
poor. This was not the case of my daughter. She had to drop out
because of racism. (Raimunda)

110

The excerpt above can lead to different interpretations of the way
racism works in Brazilian society. Looking closely at the experience of
this Aﬁo-Brazilian girl attending an elitist school in Belo Horizonte, three
different manifestations of racism are present: (1) this female student
suffered hostile prejudice (other children calling her by nicknames that
denigrated her race), and stereotypes were used against her by those who
did not belong to her race. (2) Those acts of racial discrimination, also
called popular racism, became more sophisticated, they were potential
forms of psychological racism, impeding the full development of her
capacities. She started feeling intimidated. Her learning process was
affected (She had no strategies to handle the situation. She used to be
very shy. She would not open her mouth). Her school "failure" was
blamed on her. It was her problem and she should see a psychologist. In
handling this case of racism, that elitist private school showed its own
institutional racism. (3) Structural or institutional racism is pointed out by
Sleeter (1993, p. 158) "not as a misperception but as a structural
arrangement among racial groups." Institutional racism manifests in the
way the curriculum is organized and patterns of racial relation are
established in the school policy. The case of this Afro-Brazilian girl is not
an isolated one. (4) Another important aspect deserving attention in this
scenario is the fact that this Black student is female. The dynamics of
gender construction in Brazilian society, or in any society, places a
radical difference in the way racism oppresses women and girls racially
identiﬁed as Blacks. Moreover, there is in Brazil a small, but signiﬁcant

literature on this issue.

Almost all black children with a problem in school are blamed
for their own failure. There is the expectation that we (Afro-

lll

Brazilians) do not constitute a good investment. Everything
regarding us won't work well. They say it is incapacity of
learning, psychological problems, etc. I worked with pedagogic
reinforcement and had a contract with state schools. All
children that had problems in that school were sent to us under
the label: incapable of learning. They were in their majority
Blacks. (Clementina)

The unsuccessﬁrl experience of Blacks should be analyzed in an
attempt to go beyond any simplistic idea of a conspiracy against Afro-
Brazilians students, or the temptation to associate Black students' failure
with the cultural deprivation and social disadvantage theories of the
19605 and 19705. Weis (1989) in discussing race, class, and schooling in
the United States, presented a very insightful way of approaching the
reasons for the low outcomes of Aﬁican-Americans. Weis argues that
people tend to relate to school according to their own social and cultural
backgrounds. The inﬂuence of social class in the shaping of school
experience is seen as an increasing factor among Aﬁican-Americans.
According to her, in the United States, there is a distinct separation
between those Aﬁican— Americans from the middle-class and those from
a depressed underclass. The basis for this argmnent is that the same racial
group can be allocated to different classes, yet different racial groups
even belonging to the same social class are treated dissinrilarly, because
of their race. In Brazil, the last argument can be one of the possible
explanations for the overwhelming failure of Blacks, even when
considering the poverty level of many non-Blacks. As an interviewee

said:

112

We faced a problem regarding the number of children that
could be enrolled in the public system. In this case I would say
that it is not only Blacks that faced and are facing problems.
Whites from the working class also get in trouble. The public
educational system as a whole needs revision. (.1000)

If both White and Black students from the working class, in the
excerpt above, are seen as facing the same plight, what is the reason
Blacks get in trouble in a more dramatic way? As already stated in earlier
paragraph, Blacks tend to represent a higher dropout rate, lower
promotion, and irregular school performances, when statistically and
qualitatively compared with their White peers. An explanation for this
discrepancy can be found in the interviewees' discussion about race and
culture in the school curriculum. The devaluation of the racial background
and culture of Afro-Brazilians, and the way Afro-Brazilians see
themselves were considered by a member of the movement for cruriculum
change in Belo Horizonte as a reasonable explanation for failure in

school.

Emphasizing cultural relations could become a real potential
for a better school system. It would also create better personal
relations between those who are diﬂerent. The model of
schooling we have now does not lead to the construction of this
relation in school. There is a technical vision of schooling in
Brazil. We have seen that a lot of educational projects fail to
take into account culture. We could include the cultural
manifestation present in school and bring other cultural
manifestations from the Black community. (Conceicao)

The assumption presented above claiming that there is a technical

vision of schooling in Brazil seems quite accurate. On the one hand

113

despite the educational problems described herein, the Brazilian
educational leaders have sought to improve the outcomes of schools, even
if their attempts are mainly directed to those schools which are "islands of
excellence." Team teaching, computer technology, programmed
instruction, diagnostic testing, the whole language method, the
constructivist approach, lengthened school terms, and ability grouping
have been implemented in such schools. But, reforms have failed to
address such ﬁmdamental categories as gender, race, social class, and
cultural background.

We believed that after years of social exclusion of Blacks we
should emphasize the issue of Blacks in Brazil, at the same time
including the Japanese, European, native Brazilian (Brazilian
Indian), and other cultures. We wanted to emphasize the Afro-
Brazilian culture because of the quantitative and qualitative
contribution of Blacks to Brazilian society. The Afro-Brazilian
culture is devalued in the mass media and instructional
materials. ([050)

In order to build an integrative curriculum responsive to different
racial groups that constitute a speciﬁc society, this same curriculum
should be meaningful to those racial groups. That is the aspect missed in
the Brazilian educational system. The reason for this void can be found in
the social exclusion of Blacks (former slaves) and absolute privilege of
Whites (the masters) in the Brazilian society, already pointed out in
chapter H. As a Black leader asserted: The European who founded the
school system in Brazil did not recognize the contributions of other

races. (Sebastiana)

114

In Brazil the effects produced by educational polices that are not
incarnate in the socio-cultural body of a given society, are the creation
and maintenance of discourses based on a fake racial democracy, and in
maintaining the status quo of unequal racial relations that strengthen
themselves through instructional materials and pedagogic rituals
considered noxious for the fostering of Black children cultural identity.

In discussing curriculum as a racial text, Pinar (1993) helps us
remember that "we are what we know and at the same we are also what
we do not know" (p. 61) The knowledge socially accumulated is marked
by a fragmented notion we hold of history, culture and national identity.
One of the interviewees presented in a very theoretical and powerful way

how she handled the issue of cultural identity on her classroom:

There is a void in the curriculum based on the understanding of
what is an educational process. When you say that the
curriculum, the instructional materials, and the relations
between teacher-students are discriminatory against Blacks, it
is true, but we should go beyond this assumption. There is in
society a net of representations that are expressed in the school
system. To reach this net of representations and see how they
work within the school system becomes the challenge. The
inclusion of racial issues in the school curriculum demands the
introduction of the discussion of what being pluralistic means.

I would like to explain by giving an exemple of how I worked
out the topic 'formation of Brazilian people " in my 4th grade
classroom:

115

I st - We worked on the idea of who are Brazilians through three
different vehicles: a composition; a dialogue with their families;
a drawing.

Within this huge concept of what it actually means to be
Brazilian, I decided to reach for understanding of some
speciﬁc points.

The question was: is there such a thing as "Brazilians?" The
understanding I had was that it constitutes a huge category.

We worked with pictures and magazines presenting political
demonstrations, people walking down the street, etc.

2nd - Then, we discussed what constitutes diﬂerences among
people.

First we worked with physical diﬂerences (traits, sizes etc. ).
After, we started working the notion of dijferences considered
racial. Who we considered Whites, Blacks, Japanese,
indigenous people.

We asked ourselves: are women all equal?

We discussed that women are White, Blacks, unemployed,
employed.

After this process we started discussing the content in the text.
(Catarina)

This Black leader was well educated in racial issues and was
teaching them to her students. However, that is not the case in most

Brazilian classrooms. This report directs our attention to another theme

TH

 

 

116

which emerged from the interviews: the necessity of teacher education
improvement in order to advance the understanding of issues of race and

racial identity in all classrooms.
4.5. The Necessity of Improving Teacher Education

For those Black leaders interviewed, teacher education was the
most strategic action schools could take to overcome racism in
classroom. They believed it would be diﬂicult to implement any kind of
program against racism in public schools without working closely with
the teachers. According to them a huge number of teachers were visibly
racist. Teachers should be prepared to deal with issues of difference, and
the community (family, neighborhood association) should also be
involved in that process. If we had in the municipal schools a group of
teachers willing and prepared to deal with racism we would have the

chance of implementing schools changes with less dijficulty. (Maria)

Sleeter (1993), in her essay Huwﬂhhﬂeachersﬁunsmrctﬁace,
pointed out to the dilemma present in the process of educating White

teachers about their own racism. According to this author, "to 'solve'
racism by educating teachers is to locate racism mainly in biased
individual actions, which in turn are assumed to stem from ideas and
assumptions in people's heads: prejudiced attitudes, stereotypes, and lack
of information about people of color"(p. 157). Sleeter is calling attention
to the fact that we should walk away from the assumption that it is
possible to create signiﬁcant changes in institutions just by addressing the
individual portion of racist attitudes whites have. Yet, racist attitudes

117

work for the beneﬁt of those who enjoy the privileges of their White race.
Racism is not seen by this author as a "misperception but as a structural
arrangement among racial groups." Through interviews with teachers
during a two-year staff development project, Sleeter pointed out that there
was a color-blind behavior regarding race. For teachers involved in that
project their students were just "students." Those teachers had an
interpretation of race that denied it. The same was reported by a Black
leader in Belo Horizonte: What White teachers usually say is that if they
mention this subject [racism] they will be accused of racism, and black

children in classroom would feel vulnerable. (Clementina)

Another misleading aspect in Sleeter's project was the way White
teachers approached their own racist practices, and the institutional
racism it represented. They had learned to overlook the fact that race is a
structuring element in the access to resources in the United States. Racial
groups were seen as standing on the same ground of possibilities and
opportunities. By the end of that project, unfortunately, only
approximately 13% of the White teachers started making connections
between racism and the structure of the educational system: "I'm seeing
basically how our system is set up, the value system our whole society is

set up on. And it makes me feel we are here because of a lot of suffering."

This discussion on educating White teachers in the United States is
quite important to the Brazilian experience. Sleeter asserted that: the
"teaching population in the US is becoming increasingly white, while the
student population becomes increasingly racially diverse. The

signiﬁcance of teacher race is usually framed in terms of the degree to

t’rt‘

118

which a White teaching force is appropriate for students of color"(p.
157). Although important, this challenging issue has to be handled in
Brazil in a different way from that presented in Sleeter's article. The
reason is based on what one of the interviewees in Belo Horizonte has
afﬁrrned:

With the process of proletarization of the teaching profession,
there was a boom of Black female teachers in the elementary
schools. It is necessary to understand the representation
students and teacher have of themselves, and how gender,
class, and race are approached. (Catarina)

The excerpt above brings critical elements to the discussion of
teacher education in Brazil. The absolute majority of those teaching
children from lst to 4th grade in the public school system in Belo
Horizonte are Afro-Brazilian workers. Those in schools' administrative
positions are in their majority non-Black females. Another interesting
aspect is to grasp how racism is perpetuated at the institutional level

crossing across gender and race relations.

How could a teaching force with a majority of Afro-Brazilians in a
society also having a huge contingent of Afro-Brazilians lead such a
harmful educational system for Black and adolescent children? The
explanation could be found in a possible absence of Afro-Brazilian
cultural and social inﬂuences in the Brazilian society. As two Black

leaders asserted:

If we imagine 500 hundred years of oppression and our social
and economic conditions, I believe we have done a lot. If we
take the history of Black organizations in this country since
1930, the Black Movement with all diﬂiculties (economic,

119

political, educational) has done a lot without having control of
the school system and the media. (Severino)

Our hopeﬁilness as Blacks in a country based on historical
conditions, would end up in bloodshed or insanity is another
important aspect. We Afro-Brazilians learned to dance and to
workship the Orixas [deities in the Afro-Brazilian religion].
Minas Gerais has an unknown landmark (churches and houses)
that was built by Blacks. It represents the knowledge we
brought from Africa and have cultivated up to until now. We
have also brought natural medicine, the use of herb, blessings
This society has a debt with Blacks. (Raimunda)

The ideology of whitening in a racial democracy, and in internalized
racism that could seem as an explanation for Black teachers failure in
teaching Black children. In Brazil, there is a socio-historical process
which has been consolidated with the publication of the classic book
Casaﬁrandﬂﬁenzala (The Master and the Slaves) by Gilberto Freyre,
as mentioned in chapter I, that led to the nonpoliticization of race through
the following mechanisms: mainstream discourses on behalf of a racial
democracy that according to White elites has made Brazil a more
harmonious society than South Aﬁica and the United States; educational
institutions and mass media portraying Afro-Brazilians as exotic, less
intelligent, and consequently incapable of asng important
responsibilities, whether as a family member or as a citizen; Afro-
Brazilians having to neglect their racial heritage to be socially accepted.
As one Black leader has emphasized, for the majority teaching lst to 4th
grades, especially in public elementary school, to be a teacher meant

being a working class Black woman.

TH

120

Teachers' working conditions have been described in earlier
paragraphs. What was missing in the newspapers accounts and public
documents for educational change in Belo Horizonte was the intersection

of gender, race and class in the teaching profession.

Black teachers bring with themselves to their classrooms the
ideology of whitening, racial democracy, and internalized racism. Those
mechanisms are transmitted to children and experienced by both teacher
and student through socialization and learning activities. The internalized
racism teachers might have, as a consequence of the these three
mechanisms working upon their lives, was seen by the interviews as a
dilemma the Black movement was aware of, but they did not know how

to address on a short-term basis.

In one of the schools I used to work, there were teachers that
started the school year saying that they knew those students
who would not be promoted. Those are children coming from
families with very low income and/or Blacks. The roots of this
problem are in the preparation of teachers and weak parental
involvement. It is also in the way we think about schooling
purpose. And the racism that exists in each of us. (Maria)

In order to implement structural school changes, it is fundamental to
account for existing oppressive forces that shape the lives and the
learning experience of children, as well as the pedagogic practice of
teachers. Ladson-Billings (1990), Ladson-Billings and Henry (1990),
King and Ladson-Billings (1988) have conducted important ethnographic
studies on these issues. These authors claim that in order to enhance a

form of liberatory pedagogy it is necessary to foster teachers' and

TH

 

 

121

students' identities. It is necessary to understand the relation between

knowledge, self, and culture.

In order to bring about signiﬁcant changes in Belo Horizonte public
schools, a "culturally relevant teaching" approach could be useful
framework for the improvement of teaching and learning, and for the
fostering of Black teacher identity. "Teachers are confronted with special
dilemmas because culturally relevant teaching necessarily has a double
agenda. It authenticates knowledge that may not be valued in the wider
society, but it also seeks to make standard academic knowledge available
to students who are often excluded from it by race, class, and gender"
(Ladson-Billings & Henry, 1990, p. 82). Culture is embedded in teachers'
ways of organizing classroom activities, in the criteria they use to choose

school books, and in how teachers assess children.

Another important aspect is that culturally relevant teaching
recognizes the Black diasporic experience as formative of the reality and
experience of Blacks, an experience that is not merely linked to poverty

and the legacy of slavery. A Black leader in Belo Horizonte has asserted:

They think we Afro-Brazilians have our navel buried in the
slave shacks. The history has to recognize the universal
contribution of Blacks. What should be done by now is the
distinguishing of the Black culture and at the same time to make
political decisions able to project our children for the ﬁiture.
We have to know the history, religion and culture of our
ancestors, and at the same time be prepared to deal with the
era of computers. Only belonging to the Afro-Brazilian religion
is not enough. (Sebastido)

 

m

122

Ladson-Billings (1990) in discussing the pinpose of education
presents culturally relevant teaching as diametrically opposed to the
assimilationist-utilitarian approach. The latter has the primary ﬁmction of
preparing students for an occupation in the work force. The former, as
demonstrated herein, is concerned with students' consciousness raising in
order to foster a process where students become subjects and agents of
their knowledge (Freire, 1970). The challenge expressed by the Black
leader in the excerpt above is how to enhance a schooling process in a
way that is responsive to the demands of modern societies and at the

same time recognizes

that any Black diasporic cultural matrix is not uniquely 'Black' or
Aﬁican, but an interpenetration of inﬂuences. However, those
Aﬁican cultural spaces can clarify and inform analyses of Black
realities. Culture implies memory, not just remembrance but the
serious goal to relate the individual with each and every
experience in the past that it is possible to share with a given
community. (Ladson-Billings, 1990, p. 83)

Culturally relevant pedagogy is thus a fundamental tool for any
teacher concerned with the fostering of students' identity, especially those
students whose culture has been ignored or treated as an inferior. If
institutionalized, culturally relevant pedagogy could change school reform
to school reconstruction. This change would make possible the
identiﬁcation and combating of institutional racism in school in its latent

form and manifestations.

“Ex—d

 

 

 

123

4.6. The Necessity of School Reconstruction

According to Greenman (1994), there are different ways of
conceptualizing educational change. The United States is a good example
where a set of different discourses on change has led to misleading
assumptions around this concept. According to this author it has created
the illusion that reconstruction in education is in place, when in fact it is
merely educational reform within the same structure. The structure of the
educational system remains unchanged. "Theoretically, restructuring
addresses the deep structure of education; it challenges long held notions
about what education is and how we carry it out.. .. If we are serious
about creating signiﬁcant educational change, we must work to lessening
the gap between rhetoric of restructuring and the reality." (Greenman,
1994,p.9;24)

Through the interviews it was possible to capture that for those
Black leaders, racial justice in education and school reconstruction were
interdependent issues. They seemed to be aware that their initiatives
were just the beginning of a long process in which their demand for the
reconstruction of school curriculunr, instructional materials, and teacher

education, could be a good start.

We considered as a problem the way image and language were
portraying Blacks, for example the lack of sensibility of
professionals in education toward racial issues. The school
does not recognize the racism that is still present in schools
within our contemporary society. We discussed these problems
in the Municipal Board of Education. (Raimunda)

124

Restructrning for those Black leaders implied a shift that would be
based on grassroots change. That was an important challenge posed to the

Board of Education. Because as Greenman asserts:

to create a kind of change demanded by a signiﬁcant
restructuring of education, we must make that 'extreme effort' to
examine education critically in relation to the cultural context
and the prevailing paradigm, and to become aware of emerging
paradigms that may provide more appropriate principles for the
envisioned change. (1994, p. 18)

In analyzing the interview data, salient aspects of the relation those
Black leaders had with the Board of Education express their maturity and
experience in terms of organizing the Black commrmity. Their common
platform, presented earlier, suggested changes in the public schools in
such a way that some essential structural aspects of schooling should be
transformed. When they presented their suggestions to the Municipal
Board of Education, they had already changed the name of the combined
groups' representatives from the "Commission for the Elimination of
Racism in the Municipal Schools" to "Citizenship and Afro-Brazilian
Culture in the Municipal Schools."

It was clear to the precursors of the Movement that to implement all
changes suggested by them would necessitate state and federal decisions,
as well as alliance with other social movements, non-govemmental
organizations, unions, and political parties. However, the main point that
led to difficulties in implementing the proposal was the fact that teachers,
educational policy makers, and specialists in the Municipal Board of

125

Education somehow walked away from the proposal for curriculum

change when it required a political position from them.

We faced a lot of problems with the regional coordinators in the
Municipal Board of Education. Some of them walked away from
the idea of changing curriculum. Other assumed that the
problem was class and not race. On the other hand the
proposal was quite advanced in that political context. That was
the moment when we decided to change the name from
Commission Against Racism to Culture and Citizenship in Belo
Horizonte Public Schools, to emphasize the rights of Black
students, more than specifically racial questions. We found that
the staﬂs would "agree" and listen to our opinions, but they
treated Afro-Brazilian issues in a very superﬁcial way. It is not
possible to help children to learn about dijference when
specialists, educators, and school administrators do not believe
it is a crucial point for the democratization of the Brazilian
society. (Raimunda)

Members of the Commission did not explain, from a pedagogical
standpoint, how their suggestions could be implemented on daily basis in
the school routine, which strategies would work better, etc. By the same
token, the Municipal Board of Education did not show a disposition to
embrace their political project. Therefore, the platform for curriculum
change presented to the Municipal Board of Education was not
implemented. According to specialists, educational policy makers, and
teachers it was due to the lack of support of "superior departments. " For
those demanding curriculum change it was because of a lack of political

desire on the part of Municipal Board of Education and its "superiors."

The data gathered through the interviews revealed that even facing

many limitations the Commission on "Citizenship and Afro-Brazilian

126

Culture in the Municipal School" made important contributions to the
Municipal Board of Education. In the evaluation of one Black leader:

We had the knowledge, but it was difficult to put in practice our
ideas for curriculum change. We in the Black Movement had
very high dreams. We fought for curriculum change without
understanding the structure and bureaucracy surrounding the
school curriculum. To ﬁght with institutions is more diﬁcult
than to change the curriculum in technical terms. (C lementina)

On the opinion of another:

The big lesson is to understand that the State is not going to be
ejﬁcient in the implementation of our demands if we do not
exercise a systematic demand upon the state. (Severino)

In the opinion of a teacher who was involved in the Movement for

curriculrun change:

I have the impression that the impact of our movement was not
spread over schools much more because of isolated practices
against racism, than based on the state commitment with the
issue. 1 think we Blacks are not taken as an important issue in
this country. (Conceicdo)

For one of them the most positive aspects was that:

Nowadays, teachers, professors, and technicians are
incorporating a discourse produced by us, from the Black
organizations. We have educated some White and Black folks.
We are seeing changes occurring in Belo Horizonte, as for
instance the changes which happened in the CAPE (Teacher
Education Center), and the Plural Schools proposed by the
Municipal Board of Education, that have their fruits in the
process concatenated ﬁrst by us, Black leaders (Sebastiao)

127

Perhaps racial justice in education can only be promoted if there is a
whole revision and reestructuration in the school system. Perhaps the
multicultural curriculum approach as experienced in the United States
could boost the idea of school reconstruction and racial justice in

education in Brazil.

In trying to discuss the two points posed above, it could be helpful
to compare the objectives of the commission "Citizenship and Afro-
Brazilian Culture" with both the main recommendations of the "Firs
Political- Pedagogical congress of Belo Horizonte", and "Literacy
1990/2000." Looking closely one can come to the conclusion that both
programs and the objectives of the Commission complement each other,
and might be synthesized in one uniﬁed project. But, that was not the
case. These different proposals were also presented in different moments
and with distinct goals. That lack of coalition between the organizer of
both educational congress, the Commission, and the Municipal Board of
Education can be explained in the "stubborn" idea of liberal and radical
educators in treating race as an epiphenomenon, and in the difficulty of
identifying interconnecting social problems. In addition, issues of gender
were suppressed in all of these proposals, even though many teachers
were Afro-Brazilian females. The interviewees did not have an explicit
understanding of multicultural issues, though they did have an advanced
notion of curriculum. The Black leaders' view points of curriculum are

presented in the following synthesis:

Curriculum is the summing up of experiences in school. It is
what organizes the life of students, schools, and other actors
that constitute the school. (Severino)

128

In terms of curriculum we had the objective of restating
African history; reviewing instructional materials; elaborating
new school books; to institutionalize the "20 de Novembro" as
a national holiday to reﬂect and struggle against racist
practices. (Maria)

Racism in school should be discussed in classrooms from an
early age. It is necessary to present all cultures that built up
Brazil without excluding any cultural group. It is necessary to
value the diﬂerence, to teach about the dijferent aspects of each
culture. (Joa'o)

We must think changing the pedagogic rituals (the way
children are organized in the playground, for instance), the way
the school routine is done day after day. (C onceica'o)

The word curriculum brings in itself a conception of school.
When you have to decide what is going to be taught or not, you
are doing a selection. This is the reason the curriculum is much
more than a list of discrplines. It is in fact the conception of
education present in a specific society. (Catarina)

However, cuniculmn ideals were not enough. In order to create
racial justice in education in the Brazilian society - embracing the
deﬁnitions of curriculum expressed above - it would be necessary to
bring forward structural changes in the educational system as expressed
in the document elaborated by leaders of the Black community in the
Commission "Citizenship and Afro-Brazilian Culture in the Municipal
Schools." These structural changes at least must be based on the triad:
economic changes in society; the questioning of the status quo of race,
sexual orientation, and gender privileges; and a shift in the state

government power over civil society. According to this view, structural

129

changes can only take place when liberal ideas on schooling have been
defeated, because in the liberal framework, education is seen as detached
from the political and economic life of society. Another important aspect
in the process of making structural changes in education is the issue of
empowerment. This is polemic subject, indeed - because of its different
interpretations in which some tend to see empowerment as a act of giving
power to individuals or groups, instead of creating possibilities for the
acquisition of power --, but, useful to the objective of this study because
it can be deﬁned, in the domain of multiculturalist discussions in the
United States, as "the process through which students learn to critically
appropriate knowledge existing outside their immediate experience in
order to broaden their understanding of themselves, the world, and the
possibilities for transforming the taken-for- granted assmnptions about the
way we live" (McLaren, cited in Sleeter, 1991, p. 3). This deﬁnition leads
to the discussion of how the multiculturalist approach as experienced in
the United States could also boost the idea of school reconstruction and

racial justice in education in Brazil.

However, multiculturalism, or any other kind of "ism" aiming for
racial justice in education has not found its proponents in the mainstream
sectors of the Brazilian society. There have been localized and/or isolated
initiatives implemented by Afro-Brazilian organizations, as the movement
for curriculum change in Belo Horizonte. But, a national coalition,
involving and bringing together an organized "mass" of Aﬁican

Brazilians, sharing the same political ideals, is still to come in Brazil. The

social history and the racial dynamics in Brazil are quite peculiar as

 

130

demonstrated in chapter 1. Michael Hanchard in striving to understand the

Brazilian racial dynamics has posed this question:

Why has there been no sustained Afro-Brazilian social
movement in Brazil comparable to the civil rights movement in
the United States or nationalist insurgencies in sub- Saharan
Aﬁica and parts of the New World during the post-World War 11
period? Even though there have been attempts great and small to
coalesce a divergent array of people into a racially based
movement for social change during this period, there has been no
national movement within civil society against racial inequalities
and subordinations in Brazil. (1994, p. 5)

The answer of this author to his own question is that racial
democracy arrangements in Brazil have created structural mechanisms
that work at the individual and social levels in a way that subordinates
Afro-Brazilians and at the same time neglects that subordination, creating
the conditions for the maintenance of a fake racial harmony. Even when
there are actions and reactions against racial oppression there is what
Hanchard calls "inability in mobilizing people on the basis of racial
identity" (p. 6) with the speciﬁc purpose of overcoming their racial

conditions.

On the other hand, Afro-Brazilian initiatives to improve their
education have been one of the most effective movements if compared
with trade unions, health care, neighborhood associations, and peasantry
organizations addressing specially the issue of race. Since the 19305, the

educational conditions of Afro-Brazilians have been underscored in the

newspaper. Pinto (1993) summarized newspaper articles from that period

 

131

denouncing adverse pedagogical conditions and discrimination against
Afro-Brazilian children.

In the United States there have been signiﬁcant discussions over
time about what is a proper education for Aﬁican-Americans. For
example, this issue was a key point in the WEB_Dub_ois_and_Bler_T.
Washington debates in early 20th century. By the same token, as already
stated in chapter I, multiculturalism in the United States is socially and
historically situated in the late 19605 in the conﬂuence of different
interests: "minority" groups struggling for racial justice, and liberal
educators' attempts to lessen the burden of racial inequality in education
(McCarthy, 1993).

For Aﬁican-Brazilians, deprived of their civil rights due to the
articulation and establishment of racist practices, multiculturalism is

looked upon very cautiously. As an interviewee asserted:

Multiculturalism leads me to the notion of globalization of
economy. It does not mean that culture, specially Black culture,
does not carry plural meanings that is in the essence of
culture. If for instance, I hold the assumption that Africa is my
reference and matrix, although I have never been to Africa, I
carry with me the heritage and ancestrality as I'm able to see it.
Multiculturalism probably works in countries that have a
fragmented racial identity. Because you dilute the authentic
cultural expression of peoples. The media has appropriated the
culture of peoples although it does not deepen the discussion.
All cultures have their plural meanings. Multiculturalism
ajﬁrms and neglects my presence in the world. We Blacks are a
real political and cultural potential within the Brazilian society.
To combat this potential there is a process of importing culture

132

from other societies and at the same time a process of
desempowering the culture of Blacks in Brazil. (Severino)

By the same token, there was hope for the future

Something that highlighted the process of discussing race and
school curriculum issues in Belo Horizonte was that it kept
going even if the Municipal Board of Education decided to
close down the Commission. An important event that happened
by the end of 1993 was the First Municipal Conference on
Education. In this conference the space to talk about culture
was unique and former members of the commission could
speak up. There was the idea of creating a project called Plural
Schools. In this conference Black leaders and scholars (Blacks
or not) were invited to discuss issues of race and culture within
Brazilian society. Aﬁer this conference the CAPE (Centro de
Aperfeicoamento de professores [Teachers Improvement
Center]) hired Black teachers to occupy strategic positions in
terms of building the proposal for Plural schools which
included a shift in the school curriculum. By the beginning of
this year, 1995, there is the creation of a newspaper that will be
the vehicle to divulge racial issues within public schools.

(Maria)

133

CHAPTER V

DISCUSSION/CONCLUSION

134

In discussing this study it is important to bring to the foreground
some main points that emerged in the process of understanding and
describing demands for curriculum change within the Brazilian society.
In the speciﬁc case studied herein, leaders of the Black community in
Belo Horizonte made their demands for school curriculum change at a
time in which the quality of private school and their relations with the
government were questioned. Teacher's unions and parents' organizations
also denounced the educational situation in Minas Gerais; and documents
on the necessity of school improvement had also been presented by

Boards of Education.

What brought about the "Commission for the Elimination of Racism in
the Municipal Schools of Belo Horizonte", later called "Citizenship and
Afro-Brazilian Culture in Municipal Schools in Belo Horizonte" was a
strong sense that it was the historical moment for action, with the
leadership necessary to propose curricular reforms. In demanding school
curriculum change, this leadership challenged the treatment of race as an
epiphenomenon, underscoring the fact that in the Brazilian society, race,
gender, and class share an unquestionable interlocking relationship.
Racism must be considered, along with gender and class, to explain the

economic exploitation and political oppression of non-White people.

Before I returned to Brazil to collect data for this study, I held the
hypothesis that multicultural theory could have been important for
curriculum reform in Brazil. Through conducting this study and
analyzing the data, I learned that multiculturalism in its diﬁerent versions

is a concept to be considered, but possibly not a strategy to be

135

implemented in the Brazilian context. As a Black leader in Belo
Horizonte skeptically asserted "in multiculturalism you dilute the
authentic cultural expression of peoples. " As mentioned already in this
study, some US scholars have also skeptically regarded the concept of
multiculturalism.

It is important to recognize the value of approaches to multicultural
education in the US society. Authors such as Banks (1993) and Sleeter
(1991), among others, are major proponents of multiculturalism in the US
society. No one should doubt their political commitment to build racial
equity into the educational system. The great risk of generalizing
strategies arising from this theory, however, is the transposition of
strategies and deﬁnitions of multiculturalism in education without
understanding the historical context and development of this concept and
practice in the US. Just to give an example, we could mention again the
way a leader of the Black cormnunity and 4th grade teacher approached

the issue of identity in her classroom as presented on page 113.

That classroom activity in Brazil points out the necessity of
challenging race, class and gender-based oppression. Although that
activity might not be classiﬁed as an example of a multicultural or
multiethnic educational approach in Brazil, it is exactly what Banks and
Sleeter believe should happen in classrooms in the US. What we ﬁnd in
this example in Brazil is the creation of a new paradigm based on its own
social and historical conditions, rather than an articulated argument based
on multicultural theory. Therefore, the leaders did not call the new
paradigm "multiculturalism," because it does not refer to the same history

'_1

136

and context. That does not mean that important presuppositions of
multiculturalism should not be used in Brazil. However, common
assumptions about multicultural theory have to be challenged. As
McCarthy (1993) asserts:

As departments of education, textbooks publishers, and
intellectual entrepreneurs push more normative themes of
cultural understanding and sensitivity training, the actual
implementation of a critical emancipatory multicultiralisrn in the
school cmriculurn and in pedagogical and teacher-education
practices in the university has been deferred. (Critical
multiculturalism is deﬁned here as the radical redeﬁnition of
school knowledge from the heterogeneous perspectives and
identities of racially disadvantage groups -- a process that goes
beyond the language of "inclusivity" and emphasizes
relationality and multivocality as the central intellectual forces in
the production of knowledge). (p. 290)

It seems as if in Belo Horizonte, educators and leaders of the Black
community were experiencing different ways of developing a theory able
to challenge racial inequalities in the multiracial Brazilian society. The
issue for Brazil is we might label something "multiculturalism", or another
kind of "ism," yet the context in which the term is used may be quite
different. Or we could recognize a different content and context yet keep
using the same label: "multiculturalism." The issue is how leaders in
different societies are able to challenge institutional racism, unequal
structures in societies, and savage capitalist forms of exploitation. Brazil,
as I have described in chapter one, is a society in which racial relations
have been so perverse that the watering down of racial identity on the
name of ethnic heritage can be a dangerous one. Likewise, many

approaches to multiculturalism tend to put emphasis on ethnicity instead

 

137

of culture, ignoring the fact that racial inequality has been (both in Brazil
and the US) a permanent and structural phenomenon. Also, because
Brazil is a country in which culture and ethnicity have been used by the
government, mass media, schools, and churches as a rhetorical vehicle for
racial democracy, which then lead instead to another form of racial
injustice. Afrocentrism is still an important issue to be understood by

Black peoples in Diasporas.

This study conducted in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, from January to
March of 1995, with some leaders of the Black community who had
organized the platform for curriculum change 1990, involved issues of
cousciouness raising-both for me, as an Afro-Brazilian studying
educational discrimination in the United States, and for the leaders who
wished to share their stories. It became clear that they were not
discouraged with the results of the curriculum reform movement. Hope
was still ﬂowing and Black organizations in Belo Horizonte were
working on important issues for social change and racial justice in
education. The municipal election of the Worker Party in November of
1992 had created an opportunity for progressive educators, educational
policy makers, social scientists, and educational researchers to elaborate
their ideas and propose educational and cultural projects in Belo
Horizonte. Some interviewees talked excitedly about the importance of
two projects being developed by the City Hall: "Escola Plural"(Plural
Schools) and the "Centro de Referéncia da Cultura Negra"(Center for
Reference of Black Culture). The C entro de Referéncia da cultura negra
is like a house full of mirrors in which we can see ourselves. It is the

result of our work and what we belive. (Sebastido)

it

138

It is a very rich experience. I think it will be possible to create
new ways of approaching racial issues in education. I 'm still
having the hope that it is possible to elaborate important things
regarding Afro-Brazilian people in Belo Horizonte.
(Conceica'o)

The current "Escola plural" project grew out of analyses of previous
pedagogical ﬁndings which came as a result of the Black leaders'
demands. It is a direct attempt to intervene in schools which have
disappointing educational results. Based on 8 guiding points, the project
"Plural Schools" now aims for a radical intervention in the school system
to bring about the end of selective school selection based on mainstream
cultural and social values; a sensitiveness toward the total human
formation of children; a valuing of school as a time to experience and
share culture; school as a space for collective production; intervention in
the school structure in order to understand the dynamics of culttue
present in schools; adequate socialization of children depending on their
developmental age; and a new school identity for professionals in

schools.

The second current project, the "Centro de Referencia da Cultrrra
Negra" is a cultural project which aims to collect, organize and
disseminate the history of Afro-Brazilians in Belo Horizonte. At the same
time, it represents a physical center for educational meetings, debates,

etc.

Unfortunately, because of the nature and objective of this study, I
was unable to fully analyze the pedagogical and political repercussions of

139

both projects. What is important to this study though, is that the projects
are based on the original demands that the Black leaders began in 1990,
but now taking more concrete forms. The rationale behind the projects
still intends to improve school outcomes for Black, lower class and

female students.

Educational proposals and projects based on United States
multicultural approaches in education will arrive in Brazil sooner or later.
My belief is that they will arrive ﬁrst through progressive educators
attempting to improve educational outcome for minorities. When that
occurs, Federal, State, and Mruricipal Boards of Education will try to put
pieces and bits of into practice in order to appear modem (or post-
modern) to rest of the world. Similar processes have happened with other
educational theories. An important aspect of this study is the contribution
it can give to the understanding of the limits of expanding theories of
multicultural education beyond its birth place: the United States. I suggest
a cautious skepticism should prevail while presenting those ideas in
Brazil. One of the reasons researchers in both countries have traced

parallel patterns regarding racial issues is due to what the historian
Andrews (1992) asserts:

Over the twentieth century as a whole, however, the country
with which United States race relations have been most
frequently compared is Brazil... The Brazil/United States
comparison has a compelling logic. The two countries are the
largest multiracial societies in the Americas. They share a
history of plantation slavery which extends into the second half
of the 18005. And over the course of the 19005 both societies
have confronted the legacy of slavery in the form of deeply
entrenched racial inequality. (p. 229)

140

5. What are we left with?

We are still left with some questions regarding the curricular
reform movements to end racial inequities that in fact are not easy to
answer because they depend greatly on the historical and social
conditions in which a school system in located. The main thing is not to
try to work them out as if answering a sociology of education exam.

However, it is important to understand their nature and limiting aspects.

(1) If we change (expand) the curriculum in order to include the
standpoint of "nrinorities," is there a guarantee that this curriculum will
not still carry different knowledge and expectations for children belonging
to different social classes? (2) Is it possible to take for granted that the
school commitment to social justice would bring about racial justice? (3)
Should equity in education assume that schools must consider themselves
to be the redemptor of the poor? (4) How much does teacher education
confront gender, class and race issues? (5) Are farnilies' abilities to
interact with school being included in the movement for curriculum
change? (6) Can schools overcome demographic, economic, social and

political realities simply by expanding the curriculum?

For instance, in 1990, Black leaders succeeded in gaining approval
for an amendment regarding Afro-Brazilian culture. It required that State
employees, especially those working in nursery centers and schools,
should receive speciﬁc preparation regarding issues of race. It was an
important victory because, as some interviewees recognized, preparing

teachers and other school personnel to better understand cultural aspects

141

of racism was a crucial element. However, the long-term results of that
action were mixed. After the city approved the law regarding racial
issues, the Commission "Citizenship and Afro-Brazilian culture in Belo
Horizonte Municipal Schools" closed down. That is why structural
changes in society are so important in order to bring about educational
reconstruction, and vice versa. It seems that the lessons learned by the
Black leaders from the ﬁrst round of curriculum reform in the 19905 led
them to reconsider more structural and concrete changes seen in the
current projects. Whether or not this leads to ﬁrller and more equitable
participation by Afro-Brazilians in the educational scene in Brazil remains

to be seen.

APPENDICES

142

APPENDIX A

STRUCTURED/OPEN-ENDED INTERVIEWS PROTOCOL

PART I

PROFILE OF INTERVIEW, HER/HIS PERSONAL EXPERIENCE
AND OPINIONS ABOUT SCHOOLING, AFRO-BRAZILIAN ISSUES,
AND CURRICULUTVI.

1) What is your current profession or occupation? Your age and relative
income? Do you have children in school? What have their experiences

been? How are they different from your own schooling?

2) What has been your life story which led you to hold personal views on
curriculum during the process of organizing the platform for curriculum

reform in Belo Horizonte in 1991 ?

3)Who or what inﬂuenced your belief in the importance of curriculum

reform?

4)In your opinion what are the unique characteristics of Aﬁican-Brazilian

people's experience ?

143

PART 11

WHAT MOTIVATED AND MOBHJZED THE BLACK LEADERS TO
ORGANIZE THE MUNICIPAL COMMISSION AGAINST RACISM

5) What is the name of the Black Organization you were aﬂiliated with in
1991 during the movement for curriculum change in Belo Horizonte?
What was the purpose of your organization?

6) What were considered problems in the school curriculum for Aﬁican-
Brazilians prior to 1991? How did you and the other leaders become
aware of those problems?

7) Were young Black people blamed for not succeeding in school? If yes,
where do you think was the root or the roots of the problem? Can you
give me speciﬁc examples of talented Black children in school who were
frustrated? What happened?

8) How should schools help children learn to relate to different cultural
groups?

PART HI

THE INTERNAL PROCESS OF DISCUSSION AND PREPARATION
OF THE PLATFORM FOR SCHOOL CURRICULUM CHANGE IN
BELO HORIZONTE

9) What were the main changes that your Black Organization included in
its platform for school curriculum change? What are your personal
thoughts (and the thinking of your organization) related to the ways
different cultures should be represented in the school cuniculum?

10) Did your organization believe schools should try to achieve a new
and reorganized set of pluricultural values?

ii

144

11) Was the critique of Brazilian cuniculum limited to content, or did it
include teaching methods and even broader issues, such as the purpose of
schooling?

12) What was the internal process of discussion like in your Black
Organization for the development and presentation of that platform? How
long did the platform take to write? Describe the difficulties or promising
aspects of this process? Who were key players in this? What kinds of
interests were expressed in the process? What kind of unity or
consensus? What else was important for my understanding of the process
of your deliberation?

13) Did the members of your organization have any knowledge on how
the Municipal Secretary of Education handled the curriculum? Was
such information important to your deliberation? Please explain?

PART IV

EVALUATION OF THE PROCESS

14) Do you believe that movement has had a concrete effect on Black
children's schooling in Belo Horizonte? Please explain?

15)What has the role of your organization been in the Commission since
1991? What changes do you anticipate in Belo Horizonte school
curriculum in the future as a result of your organization's work?

16) Could you tell me how you see the social and educational
implications of that movement? What were your personal goals? Were

they achieved? Why or why not?

17) Did your organization and you yourself learn something special from
that experience?

18) What were the strengthens and weakness of that movement?

ti

145

19) If you were to develop a platform for curriculum reform today, how

would you hope to do it differently? Why and for what reason?

20) Is there anything else I need to know to achieve the purposes of this
study?

NEW QUESTIONS ADDED TO THE INTERVIEW PROTOCOL
1) What is the mission of school?
2) In your opinion what does school curricultun mean?

3) In Belo Horizonte what has been the issue between public and private
schools?

4) What is (are) your understanding (5) of the term multiculturalism?
5) Does the Municipal Board of Education have implemented any

signiﬁcant change regarding school cuniculum in Belo Horizonte after the
demands of the Black movement in 1990?

U

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