Investigating Educational Responses to Diversity in Brazil during a Time of Curriculum Change
Date
2019-08
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
University of Chicago Press
Abstract
This article offers findings from a qualitative case-based research study examining the ways educators in central Brazil made sense of diversity, and the extent to which they believed recent policies in Brazil promoting greater recognition of ethno-cultural diversity are being realized in K-12 contexts. The multinational research team also examined the degree to which these educators felt that responses to diversity drawn from the Canadian context could inform Brazilian educational policy. Of note, the research participants articulated productive possibilities for promoting the inclusion of cultural diversity in varied classroom contexts. However, confirming findings from prior research, they saw recent policy shifts in Brazil related to intercultural understanding as unsupported by institutions, and thus almost completely reliant on teacher’s personal efforts and convictions. Overall, educators in this study had difficulty seeing Canadian responses to diversity as workable in Brazil, and there were a general absence of discussions concerning the teaching of Afro-Brazilian and Indigenous culture and history. Informed by insights from both sociocultural theorizing (Barton & Levstik, 2004; Wertsch, 1998) and transformative learning theory (Freire, 1970; Mezirow, 1991), findings are analyzed by working to uncover the historically derived interpretive frameworks that both enabled and constrained the various beliefs of these educators.
Description
Keywords
Education--Brazil, Diversity
Citation
Scott, D., Kawalilak, C., Dressler, R., Paiva, W. (2019). Examining educational responses to diversity in Brazil. Comparative Education Review. 63(3), 377-397, doi.org/10.1086/703982